Steps to solve difficult Windows 10/11 boot and startup failure. We will explore from POST to how Windows boot the operating system. How to solve the different problems that cause boot and startup failure. Understand screen error messages and learn how to use them to point you to the problem. How to use "Startup Repair", "System Restore" and other boot failure tools. Understanding the files critical to boot and where the files can be found on the hard disk.
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We are going to cover how to troubleshoot Windows boot problems.
In order to do that we have to break down the Windows boot process
into four phases. Pre-boot, Windows boot manager,
Windows OS loader, and the final phase is the Windows NTOS kernel. Check the
device that you're troubleshooting and make sure you understand
what BIOS or firmware is booting that PC or device.
Is it the old BIOS or is it the UEFI? The pre-boot
phase is under the control of the firmware.
Firmware initiates post, loads firmware settings.
This pre-boot process ends when a valid system disk is detected.
Pre-boot failure symptoms can include the black screen of death.
Here you want to check things like video cable, power cord,
firmly plugged into video monitor, power button
on. Another common symptom of the pre-boot
failure is a black screen with a flashing cursor.
We need to determine whether the system has passed the pre-boot phase.
Has BIOS and UEFI completed? To begin, follow these steps. Number one, if there's
any external peripherals connected to the computer, disconnect them.
If you have the black screen of death and you have that flashing cursor,
check to see whether the hard disk activity LED is flashing.
A non-active hard drive LED could indicate that the startup process is
stuck in the pre-boot phase or the firmware
phase. The third way is press the num lock key to see whether the indicator
light toggles on or off. If it doesn't, this indicates the
startup process is stuck at the firmware. If the system is stuck in
this pre-boot firmware phase, you have a higher
than normal possibility of hardware failure.
Here's a couple things you can do. If it's a laptop, remove the battery.
If it's a PC, pull the power cord from the power supply.
This forces all hardware to reinitialize. Receipt RAM DIMMs
and adapter cards. Check all internal cables inside the PC case.
If it's a laptop, verify proper voltage on the external power supply.
Rotate RAM DIMM in the DIMM0 position on the motherboard.
Reboot and try the next one. Reboot, try the next one. This is not an exhaustive
list of things you can do, but it gets you started.
Remember, the end of the pre-boot phase is when the firmware has finished all of
its tasks and responsibilities and has located a disk or media to boot
from. Now we're transitioning into the boot
loader phase. If you were thinking, man I'm glad we're
done with the black screen of death. No, we're not done. This time with the
boot loader issues, we're going to have the black screen of death with
error messages like you see below.
All of these error messages are generated by problems
found in the system partition of your hard drive.
This is where your bcd.dat file is, your boot manager,
critical system configuration information. So when
a problem exists in your system partition, these
error messages show up. The most effective way
to repair our system partition and the files that are in there
is to boot to one, a bootable flash drive with windows installation,
a dvd with windows installation. You can also boot into the recovery
partition. We're going to select the troubleshooting tools.
The easiest way to solve system partition problems
is using the startup repair. We're going to click windows 10
and let it do its thing. The good news is startup repair can fix
most of the issues found in the system partition.
When it runs, it can reboot your system up to three times.
My experience is if it reboots twice, it probably is not going to fix the
issue. Startup repair in many cases runs
automatically when windows fails to boot properly
and there is a log file shown in the path below.
While the bootloader phase is complicated,
is a difficult area to troubleshoot. I do have one last tip for you
in this bootloader phase. Bootloader does load the system registry. Sometimes that
is a problem at this point. Quick review as we get started on
troubleshooting this area. Our registry is found in the C drive
windows system 32 config folder. As I scroll down, the file that the
registry hive or the file that represents the registry
key is called the system. There is in this
directory called config another sub directory called reg backup
and it has a backup of all of these registry keys.
So in the recovery console when we boot up off our flash drive or
other recovery tools, we can go to this reg backup
take this system file right here and copy it over the top of the one in the
config directory and that can take us back in time to a
backup copy of the registry and may get you up. Now we want to go
ahead and boot our pc into recovery mode. You're getting comfortable with
us now. We're going to go to troubleshoot.
Now we're going to go to command prompt. Now that we're in recovery
and you're at the command prompt, let me show you a few things that are
interesting. Notice this is your system partition.
This is your c drive. This is where you're going to have your
registry key that we want to restore. If you want to look at your system
recovery, I mean your system partition, you can simply come to
the command prompt type in d colon and do a dir and you're actually
looking at that system partition. It's pretty well locked down so you can't do
a whole lot but at least you can take a look. To
solve our problem we want to get to c drive
and we want to get to the windows system 32 config folder.
So let's go using command prompt. So we're going to change our drive letter
to a dir and we're going to see we've got a windows directory. So we're going
to change directories to windows. We're going to now go to system 32.
Now we're in the system 32. We want to change directory again to the config
folder and that puts us in our directory that contains
all of our registry files and there you can see our system
registry file. That is the registry key. That's a
major registry key. We want to overwrite that so we want to continue
and change to reg back and here we have a copy
and the system file there is we want to copy that and overwrite the one in the
config folder. So we're going to say copy the file
that we want to copy and we're going to use
and that simply says dot dot simply says the parent folder
and that is going to be config and i'm going to hit enter
and it says okay you're getting ready to copy a file
from the reg back folder to the config folder. Do you want to do that?
I'm going to say yes and we just overwrote that system registry file.
As we transition to the third phase and the fourth phase
we start seeing a huge variety of problems. We're going to see stop error
messages after the splash screen. We're going to see specific error codes
displayed. We're going to see the screen stuck at
the spinning wheel also known as the rolling dots or we're
going to see a black screen appear appears after the splash screen and
many more. I will be covering a series of videos
that will cover this portion of the windows troubleshooting. I will
be covering things like booting into safe mode, booting into a clean mode
and yes they're different. Restoring system files, restoring
If you would like to find the rest of this series
on advanced troubleshooting for windows 10 simply go to my
youtube channel and go to the search bar and
type in the keyword advanced troubleshooting and you should get a
list of videos and that will be covering that series
on this subject.
