Mysterious PC failure - win 7 boot and linux live usb fail

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keindeo

Commendable
Mar 13, 2016
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1,520
Any good soul, please help:

I have a 5 year old desktop PC AMD phenom II x4 955 4 GB with Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit.
Since 2 weeks problems have started with booting system: blue screens, restarting booting on its own several times (if eventually Win loaded to the end everything was fine). I did 2 pass memory test from Linux live /usb - no errors. Now it got worse, PC is unusable: after BIOS loads nothing happens - its black screen.
I've suspected boot sector corruption, but when I boot from Live USB Linux Mint 17.3 Unetbootin boot menu appears (usually, though several times it didn't - black screen). After I choose loading linux - it fails - often it hangs up after signaling "acpi pcc probe failed". Although once I've succeeded - linux mounted my HDD and it seemed to work fine - no data loss, expected capacity, though unfortunately I didn't check boot partition. My Live USB works fine on 2 other machines.

Any suggestions?
 
Solution
K
SOLVED.

It appeared to be an infortunate coincidence, 2 things went wrong:

1. HDD boot sector got corrupted - thus Windows failed
2.something strange with LIVE USB Linux Mint 17.3 made with UNETBOOTIN – when I used Startup Disk Creator to reinstall linux instead, it went fine (or maybe another coincidence)

Reinstalled Windows and now its OK.

Apart from that thanks for suggestions to both of you.
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JMW22

JMW22

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Dec 21, 2015
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http://askubuntu.com/questions/584248/boot-error-acpi-pcc-probe-failed

This is an unhelpful error message that doesn't actually mean anything on its own. I've never used Mint, but my understanding is that it's a lot like Ubuntu. Unfortunately, Ubuntu tends to choke on hardware issues. You mentioned unetbootin - I haven't heard of this but it sounds like it's no good for troubleshooting.

Check this page for a list of system rescue cd's:

http://lifehacker.com/5984707/five-best-system-rescue-discs

I would personally try anything on that list other than Knoppix. Make sure one of these will boot to a grub screen. If it goes to a grub screen, you can (mostly) eliminate the kind of catastrophic bios issues that would leave your computer totally unbootable. If it boots to grub, it's definitely booted to *something*. After that, you can get more useful information about your problem than just 'black screen'. If your USB distro tries to put you into graphical mode as early as possible, and doesn't give you a way to opt out, it's not appropriate for any kind of system rescue. Your goal should be to boot to a linux command prompt, after which you can run dmesg and look for hardware issues, or pipe the output to a file that you can then place on a pastebin site so other people can help you like this:

dmesg > dmesg.txt (assuming the USB drive is mounted as root)

You can also use the tools on those rescue images to check for errors on the disks. Windows is likely to flip out over mild hardware issues, and unfortunately Ubuntu and similar distros are likely to do the same. I would go ahead and run an antivirus program while you're at it, just to be sure.
 
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K

keindeo

Commendable
Mar 13, 2016
2
0
1,520
SOLVED.

It appeared to be an infortunate coincidence, 2 things went wrong:

1. HDD boot sector got corrupted - thus Windows failed
2.something strange with LIVE USB Linux Mint 17.3 made with UNETBOOTIN – when I used Startup Disk Creator to reinstall linux instead, it went fine (or maybe another coincidence)

Reinstalled Windows and now its OK.

Apart from that thanks for suggestions to both of you.
 
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