Computer boots to black screen. BIOS stuck

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raphealq

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Sep 1, 2013
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18,535
Hi,
Yesterday my computer was working fine. Today I turn it on and it goes to a black screen with a blinking line in the top left corner. I opened the BIOS but as soon as I enter the "boot" screen, the BIOS freezes.

I unplugged all externals and nothing works.
 
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Before reformatting I would also reset bios to optimized defaults. Make sure the SSD is selected at the boot hard drive.

Pull your data drive before doing anything destructive like a windows install. Also check for firmware updates for the SSD.
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01111111

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Jun 7, 2016
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Sounds like BIOS is fine. The problem is the OS.

A flashing underscore in the top left usually indicates a corrupted or missing BCD (Boot configuration data).

what OS are you running? Here is my fix for the issue if running windows 7/8/10.

Find Boot media and boot to it, select repair computer. Open the dos prompt and type the following commands:

bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot
bootrec /rebuildbcd
bootrec /scanos (may still not find anything)

Reboot and see if you are booting to windows, if not reboot to OS disk and find out what is your primary partition with windows directory,
C:
dir
as well as
D:
dir

after you know for sure which is correct type this command: bootsect /nt60 X: /force (where X is the drive letter containing windows)

With these steps I have fixed hundreds of "broken" systems. Sometimes you may have a damaged hard drive and this may only fix things temporarily, either way if you boot up, back up your info! And then run tests to see if your drive is healthy.
 
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raphealq

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Sep 1, 2013
52
1
18,535
I appreciate you taking the time to help me. I am running Windows 10 off an SSD. I followed all your instructions and when I boot from the SSD, it still shows the blinking underscore.

My SSD only had the OS on it, I have another HDD with all my data. Do you think I should just format the SSD and reinstall Windows 8 (it's what I upgraded to Windows 10 from).
 
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01111111

Respectable
Jun 7, 2016
179
0
1,860
Before reformatting I would also reset bios to optimized defaults. Make sure the SSD is selected at the boot hard drive.

Pull your data drive before doing anything destructive like a windows install. Also check for firmware updates for the SSD.
 
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