Windows 10 won't boot After Forced Shutdown

Hi I have a dual boot (windows 10 1809) and Windows 10 (20H2) that has been running fine. Yesterday I installled two 14TB EasyStore and Elements drives and put them in a RAID 1 config to backup my drives. I decided to copy the files overnight from my smaller 4TB drive.

I woke up this morning to the error "Windows can't find source folder" when copying one of the files. I checked to see if both the RAID 1 and source HDD were both readable and they were.

I said try again but after a minute of explorer trying to reinitiate the copy, the error came again. I tried accessing the source drive but file explorer locked up. I tried to hit CTRL+ALT+DEL but the computer wouldn't respond so I went to the back of the PC and shut it off with the PSU power switch.

I rebooted but now my PC won't boot. It gets to the BIOS menu and starts trying to load Windows with a black screen. That's it. All my drives are still plugged in and show on my BIOS including the RAID 1 array. What can I do to get Windows back. It won't even go into WIndows recovery mode

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Ok, so my computer booted up when I unplugged the HDD that was giving me faulty read option. I've never seen Windows not boot becaues of an internal HDD. I have data on that HDD I'd like to recover. What can I do?

Hi,

A defective disk can / will prevent system startup event if it is not the boot drive... Defective SATA logic board can lockup a computer on BIOS /UEFI initialization.

Try to leave only your Boot disk connected and attempt to boot... If this works shut down and try to connect back your defective drive.

If your defective disk still "logically" appears in you bios. You can try a bad block recovery software like Spinrite 6.0. from a bootable device.

This is if there is no "Click of Death" occurring at the moment. (listen to the drive for repetitive clicking sound) if it's the case your drive is mechanically broken and need "Expert attention to recover"

If the drive sounds right but doesn't appear in your BIOS or block bootup sequence, Your Logic board is broken. In that case you could try to replace it with one from another exact same model board to try to recover your data.

MaloK said:

Hi,

A defective disk can / will prevent system startup event if it is not the boot drive... Defective SATA logic board can lockup a computer on BIOS /UEFI initialization.

Try to leave only your Boot disk connected and attempt to boot... If this works shut down and try to connect back your defective drive.

If your defective disk still "logically" appears in you bios. You can try a bad block recovery software like Spinrite 6.0. from a bootable device.

This is if there is no "Click of Death" occurring at the moment. (listen to the drive for repetitive clicking sound) if it's the case your drive is mechanically broken and need "Expert attention to recover"

If the drive sounds right but doesn't appear in your BIOS or block bootup sequence, Your Logic board is broken. In that case you could try to replace it with one from another exact same model board to try to recover your data.

Yeah the Drive shows up in BIOS but there is no click. the computer just can't boot with it plugged in. I'll look into Spinrite. I really don't understand what happened. I don't think I shorted anything out on its logic board.

edo101 said:

Yeah the Drive shows up in BIOS but there is no click. the computer just can't boot with it plugged in. I'll look into Spinrite. I really don't understand what happened. I don't think I shorted anything out on its logic board.

How old is that drive ?

Do you have a Windows PE solution or Windows Installation media ?

MaloK said:

How old is that drive ?

Do you have a Windows PE solution or Windows Installation media ?

I think it's prbly 6 years old. And no Windows PE solutions. Just a bunch fo hard drive tools like Partition Wizard. I do have a WIndows 10 bootable USB for WIndows installation though @MaloK

edo101 said:

I think it's prbly 6 years old. And no Windows PE solutions. Just a bunch fo hard drive tools like Partition Wizard. I do have a WIndows 10 bootable USB for WIndows installation though @MaloK

Ok, try to boot your windows installer and at the installation window press "Shift+F10" to open a command prompt.

Try to see if your disk is available D: or E: , Use dir command to list content...

Once found run chkdsk /r /f on it. this will take a while.

After that try to copy files from it to your C:\SomeDirectory. if it succeed from there you can copy your files directly or try to boot back in windows, see if your drive is ok and copy files from it as soon as possible.

I've had a similar issue with an old Western Digital Green 2 TB hard drive I used as a storage drive. I had one day I was copying a steam game to it and the install failed cause it could no longer see the disk drive.

Back when I was in college, we used a Linux boot environment called Hirens Boot CD, and it brought up a big list of recovery tools and diagnostics for all your hardware. There was a program called HDD Regenerator, which would scan each sector of the drive "even the MBR area" and attempt to repair the bad sectors. The program found over 5000 bad sectors within the first 500 GB of the drive scan, and it took nearly 6 hours to do the repairs and scan the drive. But luckily it was able to repair the bad sectors enough to where I was able to recover the existing data. After that, I did a full format of the drive "not quick format" and the drive surprisingly worked for 5 more years before it decided to not spin up anymore.

I don't know if HDD Regenerator is still out there, but if you're able to find it, and use it in a dos environment, you may be able to recover your data from that drive if the program can recover the bad sectors. I'm not sure of other programs out there that can recover bad sectors on a drive.

lmaneke said:

I don't know if HDD Regenerator is still out there, but if you're able to find it, and use it in a dos environment, you may be able to recover your data from that drive if the program can recover the bad sectors. I'm not sure of other programs out there that can recover bad sectors on a drive.

Yes... One of my big favourite is SpinRite 6.0, it boots from a floppy in pure DOS and access the HDD with Direct Hardware and works on any file system. been using it since 2005 and it is sill current and effective to also recover SSDs too. just did one last week.





I know it's 90$USD... But it really worth every penny.

Used at Level "2" it will Recover Bad Blocks and Put back disk in function at a good speed.

It's an extremely robust and thorough piece of software... I use grub and memdisk to load the floppy image from a bootable USB thumb drive and it's the most reliable recovery solution I have ever tried.

SpinRite - Wikipedia

I'll definitely need to give that software a try.

MaloK said:

Ok, try to boot your windows installer and at the installation window press "Shift+F10" to open a command prompt.

Try to see if your disk is available D: or E: , Use dir command to list content...

Once found run chkdsk /r /f on it. this will take a while.

After that try to copy files from it to your C:\SomeDirectory. if it succeed from there you can copy your files directly or try to boot back in windows, see if your drive is ok and copy files from it as soon as possible.

With that drive plugged in, I cannot boot into my Win10 USB installation drive. If I leave it out and then run it, post USB boot, hitting Shift + F10 and running Diskpart only shows 2 of my drives. The USB stick and one SSD. It doesn't show all my drives. Not sure why. My Win10 USB is based on Win10 1809 btw so I don't know if it's too old of a flavor. The only time I see all my disks is when I get to the point where it asks me which disk to install to. But Command Prompt for some reason can't see all the drives @MaloK