Inaccessible Boot Device

[spinningstill]

Hello. Working on a machine that gives me a inaccessible boot device error. I can't get into safe mode and have tried the command prompt to remove updates. Says the updates are not a valid windows update. I have tried a USB creation tool to repair, but still no go. My last resort is to take out the HDD, make a back up of the user folder then try a reinstall keeping user data.

Its an ZT Systems computer. Would prefer to find a fix.

 

[Rogue Leader]

Sounds like corruption in the MBR or GPT (depending how win 10 was initially installed, and assuming you have Win 10). You are smart to try and back the data up and IMO format the whole drive and reinstall Windows. If you have an MBR issue, reinstall won't fix it.

 

[spinningstill]

Would that mean the HDD is bad? Perhaps coincidental to the previous updates. They said they came home after Christmas and it wasn't working. Computer is five years old. Taking a long time to load user folder. Trying to copy now.

As a note I did walk through the fix mbr commands. It discovered the OS, but still would not load. It initially said no OS discovered.

 

[Rogue Leader]

Would that mean the HDD is bad? Perhaps coincidental to the previous updates. They said they came home after Christmas and it wasn't working. Computer is five years old. Taking a long time to load user folder. Trying to copy now.

As a note I did walk through the fix mbr commands. It discovered the OS, but still would not load. It initially said no OS discovered.

It could mean the drive is bad, but it also could be just a crash that screwed it up. I mean me personally if I get 5 years out of a consumer hard drive I figure I got my money's worth. And the slow loading is a sign of a hard drive that may not be happy.

Up to you if you want to try and reformat it and see how it runs. If it truly is dying the problem will show up fairly quickly in slow performance, or corruption.