So your PC won't boot up, you're having boot issues.
I know that's happened to a friend of mine.
Anyway, and let's go talk to Wes and find out what's going on.
Hey, Wes.
Hey, Zack, how are we doing?
I've got a good one for you.
All right.
Okay. So, my next-door neighbor's uncle's cousin's
roommate's computer and boot up issues.
He's having trouble with it.
Common problem.
Yeah, it's like sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't.
Is there anything that we can look for,
like per clusters to that event happening?
Something that would tell us that there's a problem?
Well, I'll tell you what,
two of the things that come to mind right away is,
when you press power on your computer,
you get a little drive indicator light that says,
“Hey, there's activity going on.”
But then when the computer boots or doesn't boot,
you say you have a blank screen,
you never actually get to that log in to the desktop
of your operating system.
Sometimes, when you press power on the computer,
you might get some kind of error present on the screen.
It could be a low-level post.
I think, he said he saw that. Yeah.
No, okay.
Asking for a friend here?
Yeah, definitely.
Sometimes that can be a post error,
it may have something to do with a boot device,
or it could be your BIOS telling you,
for instance, no boot device detected.
So those are some of those telltale signs
that you're having some kind of problem,
some boot device issue, if you will.
So if that's happening, what are some of the underlying,
like under the hood issues going on?
Well, I'll tell you what, how about this?
How about we go ahead and we boot our computer up
and we can kind of see what it looks like ahead of time?
Wonderful.
All right.
So I'm going to go ahead
and I'm going to start my screen up here.
And you can say we're just kind of starting up from scratch.
We press power on our computer
and we can see our BIOS coming up
and, well, notice what we don't see here, Zach.
- There's absolutely nothing going on. - Absolutely, nothing on the screen.
Nothing is happening there.
So we get a blank screen and that's one of those signs.
Again, like I was saying,
one of the other signs might be that you actually see
an error of some sort on the screen.
A lot of times it could say no boot device found
no or operating system not found.
And again, that a lot of times
it's going to have something to do,
we don't know exactly what,
but it's going to have something to do with the boot device.
Now you ask me about what are some of the things
that can do to potentially cause that?
Well, one of the things that comes to mind
is outright storage… the boot device fails.
Now I keep saying boot device.
Let me clarify why I'm saying that,
because in today's day and age,
I can't tell if you have one of the NVMe solid-state drives,
a traditional solid-state drive,
or even the old mechanical rotating disc hard drives,
hard disk drives.
We're talking about drives, right?
Drives in general.
So that's why I'm saying the boot device.
But let's be clear that we are talking about
whatever your internal storage is,
and that device might have just failed.
Now the other thing that can happen, too,
is that your operating system looks for a bootstrapping code.
In old days, we called this the master boot record
in more modern systems.
Right, I remember that.
That's right.
Another acronym for our tech bench.
But the other thing could be what's called GPT
for UEFI-based BIOS today.
Take the technical jargon aside, the BIOS gets done,
starting up all of the hardware,
it says, where is the operating system?
And it looks to that boot code.
If that boot code gets corrupted through this file corruption
because of a failing hard drive, malware on the system,
then it's not going to be able to bootstrap the operating system,
and you could get issues on that
and again, more errors on the screen as well.
The other thing could be you could have a loose connection.
One of the things that I've noticed is that…
- It's a liquid sunshine. - … is that it always rains in Florida.
As we’re recording this,
there's lots of liquid sunshine going on.
Well, that could be the problem too,
get up general, just power.
Oh yes.
And I didn't even really think about that.
We don't have a good surge protector.
Simple fixes first.
You might actually turn the power off on the surge protector.
So I mean, we can't overlook that.
Other things could be a disabled power connector,
it could be a data connector,
a data cable connector on the motherboard
that wasn't installed properly.
I know that I've actually been guilty of this myself
when I replaced a drive, put a new drive in,
or added a second drive to a machine
that already had one and I didn't get those cables,
maybe rerouting cables, didn't get those cables plugged in.
Another thing, too, it could be just the interface
on the motherboard itself.
Within BIOS, you have settings that are generally set,
preset by the manufacturer.
When you're building a computer now,
you might end up leaving one of those interfaces off.
And what I mean by that is we have think about
the light switch in your house, right?
Sure.
If I turn the light switch off, the light is not going to work.
I had to go over and I have to turn the light switch on
to get that light to work.
Well, if you plug a drive data cable
into one of those interfaces that has been disabled,
or if somebody gets into the BIOS
and they make a misconfiguration,
that turns that interface off.
And then when the BIOS goes to look and says,
“Hey, I need to find that boot device," it doesn't find it.
So these are some of the things that can cause the problem.
Other things that might be the problem, too.
It might be a non-boot device.
For instance, a USB device left plugged in
to a port on the motherboard.
So a USB left plugged in could affect the boot?
It could.
And a lot of your modern firmware platforms, right,
what they can do is they can say,
“Hey, I looked at that USB device,
I didn't find any boot code on it.
So let me just go ahead
and look past that and I'll look for other devices.”
Optical disc, if you have it in there, network,
it can look to the network to find an operating system,
there's something called pixie boot, and it can look finally,
and a lot of times in your boot sequence,
the last thing that I'll look for
is it'll look for the internal fixed drive.
So you could have a USB device
that's causing your computer not to boot.
So that's a question I have for you.
Is it best practice to leave a USB device plugged into your PC or not?
Well, if it doesn't have any boot code on it,
chances are you're not going to have any problems.
But I will tell you, if you go to boot your computer up
and it says no boot device found,
then you know that you've got one of the BIOS
that doesn't really handle that well
and you just unplug it and restart the machine.
And a lot of times we can have an issue, I tell you.
So let's go into our BIOS here, what do you say?
We'll reboot our machine and we'll see what we can find out here.
So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to reboot this machine
and you're going to see it go from the blank screen
back into our BIOS and I'm hitting that F12 we see for the boot.
That F12.
Right. And here's one of the things that I see.
First of all, I do see this little USB flash drive.
We have exactly that.
We've got a USB flash drive
that's actually plugged into our machine right now,
but it's not causing an issue.
But the thing is, it's not a boot device.
So, even though the BIOS is looking at it
and not having a problem with it,
it's not finding any boot code there.
So it's kind of pausing right there.
So let's go ahead and we're going to enter our setup
and we'll get into the BIOS,
and I can see that it likes to do… this BIOS firmware.
Parlez-vous francais?
That's right.
It likes the default to French here.
There's a firmware glitch that we're waiting for Gigabyte
to actually fix that problem here.
So now we've got the right language here.
But one of the first things I see is
this is where our drive interfaces would be connected.
Notice that it's saying no device found.
Right.
It's not finding it on SATA, it's not finding it in the PCI slot
in case we had an adapter connecting a hard drive,
and it isn't finding the M2 drives,
which are those NVMe or SATA SSDs
that could be plugged into the motherboard.
So, I can tell right away that it's not finding that device.
Why is that?
Well, let's take a second to just talk about that.
Again, this could be the fact that the devices failed.
Kind of like we talked about.
We could have a loose data connection or honestly, really,
we could have a loose power connection
or we might have a power supply that's failing too.
So we'd have to do some troubleshooting on that.
Or finally, it could be the fact that just the drive itself,
the interface that it's plugged into is turned off.
So let's do a little inspection here.
Let's get into our devices.
And what I want to do is I want to go into the advanced mode here
and I'm going to go into settings
and then what we're looking for,
notice that we have second down
in the top here, Zack, we've got IO Ports.
I'm going to hit enter
and we're going to enter into IO Ports, right?
So if I had NVMe configuration
and I knew that I had a device plugged into this
and it was using that M.2 NVMe interface
and I hit Enter and it said no device found,
then at this point, I would know that that device has failed.
Now, for us, that's not the case because I know
again, I know a little bit about this computer
that we don't have that plugged in.
So I know that's not the issue.
So the next place that we have to look
is we have to look at the SATA, the serial ATA interface.
And typically, you have a series of ports, multiple ports,
and you can see SATA0, SATA1, SATA2, SATA3
and there's a SATA4 down here if we scroll down a little bit,
you'll see there's a SATA4.
Now, as we scroll back up to make it a little bit easier,
right, I notice that SATA4 is enabled, all right.
I noticed that SATA3 here is enabled as well.
All right.
I know that SATA2 is enabled
and I noticed that SATA1 is disabled,
but I also see that SATA0 is enabled as well.
So out of all these four ports that we have,
one of these interfaces is disabled.
Now, this can happen when somebody has just really fast.
What they've done is they've gone ahead
and they've added another drive.
They didn't pay attention to where those cables were placed
and they put the cable in the wrong port.
And if it's disabled, it's like the light switch,
it doesn't matter what's plugged into it,
the light doesn't work if the switch isn't on.
So if we look, we've got to get back in here,
and what we've got to do is enable that.
So we can go over here to Port 1.
Sometimes the click works and the mouse here,
other times you can just hit Enter
or you can just navigate to it.
So, now what we have to do is we have to say, you know what?
We're going to go ahead and we're going to enable this.
And my first thought is that
that's going to solve the problem.
So let's go ahead.
Let's save our settings and let's go ahead
and exit our setup
and notice that it's telling me what the modifications are.
Port 1 is now going to be enabled.
And let's see if that fixed the problem.
We're going to say yes, and you're going to notice
that it's going to reset, all right,
and reset for us just means it's going to reboot our computer.
And what we're hoping to see is that
we get the Windows little logo to start launching.
The spinning cheerio?
Exactly, yeah.
And notice I don't see that, Zack.
Yeah, I don't see it either.
It went right back to that dark screen.
So why is that, all right?
Well, that's because that port was disabled,
the BIOS rearranged what's known as the boot sequence.
It says, “Hey, I already looked there was no drive.”
I looked to the USB device, so we might see that now
that that's turned back on, it didn't automatically rearrange
with a firmware looking for the boot device.
So my thought is that would be the next step.
Let's get back in here and see if that is the case here.
So I'm going to go ahead and reboot this computer real quick.
And again, I know it takes a couple of reboots
to kind of get back in here.
We're going to go back into F12.
We're playing Detective.
That's right.
Now, notice we do have a boot manager here.
All right.
It does know that that boot manager is there,
but this is a temporary boot manager,
boot sequence, I should say, if you will.
And if I selected here, there's nothing that says
the next time I restart this computer
that it's going to pick that.
So we want to go back because it also sees the drive.
Remember, the drive wasn't there earlier,
and if you remember the boot manager wasn't there either.
So this is temporary, and what we need to do
is make sure that that's a more permanent fix setting.
So let's go back into our setups.
We'll probably see that it reverted to French.
And yes, it's reverted to French. And again…
Oui.
Yeah, that's right.
Like I said, I don't speak French
and I have nothing against it.
It's just a little firmware glitch here.
And again, we're waiting for Gigabyte to make a fix to this.
So saving it's not really going to help.
But I do see now, notice how it has changed, right?
Yes.
It does detect what our boot… really, that our devices there.
It doesn't know that it's the boot device yet.
What we have to do is come down here
to the boot sequence, all right.
And if we double click that notice
that it's checking for that flash drive first.
Sure, it is.
A flash drive is a non-boot device.
It is.
So it's also looking there,
but then it looks to that hard drive
and it's not really looking to the boot record itself.
Here's the boot record.
That's the Windows boot manager.
So what I need to do is I need to say, you know what?
Don't look to this thumb drive.
Let's rearrange this.
Look to the Windows boot manager and that maybe…
That’s really how you were able to do that.
Yeah, maybe look to the hard drive.
But again, more so I want to look for that boot manager
that is right on the hard drive.
Notice how these two are identical.
So it's saying look to the boot manager on this device.
Next time, hopefully, it'll find it.
So what we're going to do is we're going to choose escape.
We'll choose save and exit.
And what do you say we go ahead and let's reboot this device.
Now we're going to save our settings here.
We're going to say yes to this.
And let's just take a second here
and watch and see what happens.
It's going to reboot.
And now it's saying, “Hey, let's look to the boot device.
I found the boot code.
Hopefully, potentially, and there's the spinning cheerio.
So what I'm seeing here, Zack,
is that we should see a desktop.
Hopefully, at least the login.
And there we go.
So notice Zack, what we did,.
We did a little bit of troubleshooting.
We did.
We did a little bit of detective work.
We did.
And it could be connections, it could be a failed boot device.
You have to check your power connections as well.
You have to check your… like you mentioned the surge protector.
You could have just turned that off.
And then after we turn that interface back on,
we had to tell BIOS, this is where you look for,
this is the boot code, not temporarily,
but permanently set that boot sequence
so that the next time we reboot it,
it knows exactly where to look and our device boots up.
Thank you, Sherlock Wes.
All right.