Unable to boot- stuck on blue screen with spinning dots.

I returned home from work today to find that my computer won't boot. Great, it's going to one of those weeks... After the bios screen and the windows 10 logo, the computer hangs on the following screen, blue background with the spinning white dots. It looks like it's trying to log in, but it gets stuck. The dots never freeze, or at least not in the hour or two I've left it- it just keeps spinning and trying to log in. Before I go further, I'll give you some specs:

Homebuilt Windows 10 desktop, up to date (upgraded from 7 months ago)
Gigabyte z87x ud3h mobo
Haswell i5-4670k
Nvidia 780ti
8gb ram

Ok, where was I. The strange part about this is that everything was working fine yesterday, and I didn't really do anything since then. I upgraded from W 7 to 10 months ago and it's been working fine. There were no windows updates yesterday (Feb 22nd), and I didn't install any other driver or system updates. In fact the only things I did install were the Steam VR test and a game on steam. Nothing else was changed since the last time it booted properly.

Now, onto what I've tried. I'm at a bit of an impasse here because I can't really get the computer to do anything. Booting into bios works, but that's about it. I can't get into safe mode (thanks W10, F8 doesn't work, can't restart into it from desktop, or from login screen). If anyone knows another way, let me know. I've messed around with cables inside the tower, plugged and unplugged hard drives. In the course of restarting many times, I got a "bios corrupt" error, after which it started recovering into the secondary bios (losing all my OC settings and other bios settings). But the problem persisted. I then tried updating my bios, but I keep getting "invalid file" messages when I try to update from bios/Qflash. Finally, I didn't have a W10 recovery drive, but I downloaded one from Microsoft. Startup repair says it cannot find any issues, and attempting a system restore gives me the error "you must specify which windows installation to restore. Restart, select OS, then select system restore." that doesn't seem helpful. Ok, on to command prompt. Trying to enter safe mode from here gives me a "boot config data could not be opened. System device not found." Then I tried to rebuild the master boot record (as detailed here How To Use Command Prompt To Fix Issues With Your PC's Boot Records) with no luck. I've called it a day here.

Anyway, I think this sums things up. Let me know if you need any more info, or if you have any ideas on how to continue from here. Is there anything else I can do in the command prompt? Thank you very much.

Have you tried a Ctrl+Alt+Del when the blue circles are spinning and seeing if you can get to a screen where you can try a Shift +Restart to get in the advanced start-up options?

I have. No commands seem to work on that screen unfortunately.

Maybe the only option you have left is a clean install and at the same time delete all partitions to start afresh with the correct W10 partition scheme. Do not enter a product key, skip that stage and W10 will automatically activate since you have already run W10 on your machine.

I hope you have some backups of your files because this process will wipe all data from your hard drive. If you do not it would be worth trying to attach your hard drive to another PC so that you can extract as much data as possible.

If you are not prepared to do a clean install, there may be a way to run a bootable repair disk such as described here:

Windows 10 Recovery Tools - Bootable Rescue Disk

philc43 said:

Maybe the only option you have left is a clean install and at the same time delete all partitions to start afresh with the correct W10 partition scheme. Do not enter a product key, skip that stage and W10 will automatically activate since you have already run W10 on your machine.

I hope you have some backups of your files because this process will wipe all data from your hard drive. If you do not it would be worth trying to attach your hard drive to another PC so that you can extract as much data as possible.

If you are not prepared to do a clean install, there may be a way to run a bootable repair disk such as described here:

Windows 10 Recovery Tools - Bootable Rescue Disk

I don't think I'm quite ready to clean install just yet. That's my last resort, but we can come back to that if I exhaust all other options. When I return home from work I'll swap out the SATA cable, and attach the ssd to another computer to see if it's the drive itself that's the problem (and to make some new backups). And perhaps I should add that after leaving the computer over night, it progressed past the spinning circle to the log in screen (I have it skip user log in, so it went straight to the screen with my profile name and picture- the screen just before loading to desktop). Again, no commands work here, but at least it's recognizing something on my drive if it can access my user name?

Anyway, I'll attempt the repair disk you linked later today as well. But do you think could you explain the difference between this tool and using windows installation media to perform a reset (which should keep personal files but reset drivers,etc)? I've gone through the thread but I'm still not sure exactly what it does. And thank you for the help.

What about making a windows repair disk and logging into system restore from it?

Joe

donegaljoe said:

What about making a windows repair disk and logging into system restore from it?

Joe

Hey Joe. I did download a repair disk and mentioned some of my results at the end of my post: "Startup repair says it cannot find any issues, and attempting a system restore gives me the error "you must specify which windows installation to restore. Restart, select OS, then select system restore." that doesn't seem helpful. Ok, on to command prompt. Trying to enter safe mode from here gives me a "boot config data could not be opened. System device not found." Then I tried to rebuild the master boot record (as detailed here How To Use Command Prompt To Fix Issues With Your PC's Boot Records) with no luck. I've called it a day here."

I'll add that "chkdsk /r" in command prompt returned an error as well (sorry, don't remember what it was). But the point is.. a lot of these results seem to indicate that my OS hard drive isn't being recognized. However, the drive does show up in BIOS. That makes me suspect it's not a hardware problem, but rather something corrupt in the OS. Regardless, I'll attach the SSD to another computer later to determine this.