Just dug out my old win10 tower from storage (long story). And tried to boot it after about 2 years of sitting in a cardboard box. Gets as far as the windows 10 boot screen, lots of spiny dots in a wheel, mouse shows up on a black screen, then nothing.
My current theory is since everything gets past post and onto the windows 10 splash, that the prolonged storage (possibly including cold/damp issues) has led to the SSD either dying to some extent or at least the data on it becoming corrupt.
Trying to boot into safe mode (f8) does nothing.
Tomorrow’s job is to show back up at the office with a win10 installer on a USB and try and force a repair/clean install by booting from the usb.
Would appreciate any alternative suggestions/theories before I try this though.
On last use the pc was perfect. AMD Ryzen 1700x, 32gb Corsair DDR4, 1080Ti, 3x SSD and 1x HDD = 2TB storage mostly unused.
Sadly yes, was planning to upgrade to pro as I need to get it booting on LAN for RD eventually…if I can get it to boot off USB I might just clean install it with Win10 Pro.
Yeh possibly, the good news is I’ve got multiple drives on this PC so hopefully I can try repair, or clean install on various drives. Should rule out a hardware issue anyway.
Think the cold and damp of storage has gotten the better of this PC…I’m leaving it 24hrs in a warm room before I meddle with it any further. It’s a shame to waste the hardware but I might need to just strip it and start again.
Strangely the water cooling seems to make a lot more noise than it used to…like a trickling sound…again I’m putting that down to cold and inactivity.
Is it custom water cooling? Could it have started to leak? Algae growth in the system?
It seems like a pretty snazzy build. It would be shame to lose it, even if it is a couple of years old.
To check whether it’s a software or a hardware issue, you could try putting in an Ubuntu Live USB and run it from there. If that works, then maybe reinstall Windows.
I’ve been told about SSDs losing data if they haven’t been powered for a long time. I’ve never seen it happen myself. But it could be that you just did.
Could well be the case regarding the SSDs.
The water cooling is just a basic closed loop system cooling the CPU. Where it’s been stored for so long I guess it could have something building up in it…might be time to figure out how to drain, clean and top it back up…
So after booting from a USB it seems the Win10 install wasn’t salvageable, quick reformat of C:/ seems to have done the trick with a clean install. The other drives all seem fine.
Suspect that SSD just wasn’t happy being left off for so long. That particular drive is the oldest one in the system, a carry over from a previous machine, which probably made it the weak link.