What to do if Windows refuses to start

Win­dows won’t start. Sweat ran down my back. Do you real­ly need to buy a new com­put­er? Do not hur­ry! First you need to take a few sim­ple steps, which we will talk about in this arti­cle.

Which PCs may have the problem?

The oper­at­ing sys­tem may refuse to boot on absolute­ly any desk­top PC and lap­top. Most often, this sit­u­a­tion occurs if the com­put­er was turned off incor­rect­ly. For exam­ple, you decide not to wait for the shut­down by flip­ping the switch on the surge pro­tec­tor. Or the sud­den shut­down of the PC was caused by an error in the oper­at­ing sys­tem or the incor­rect behav­ior of any pro­gram.

The most sad sit­u­a­tion will be if one of the com­po­nents fails. But this prob­lem is easy enough to iden­ti­fy. If the proces­sor burned out, then you won’t wait for a reac­tion from the com­put­er at all, no mat­ter how much you press the pow­er but­ton. The fail­ure of the RAM will cause the cor­re­spond­ing sig­nal to sound at start­up. How­ev­er, some­times it does with­out it, so in extreme cas­es, be sure to try to get one of the slats — all of a sud­den it real­ly turned out to be dam­aged.

Do not for­get that none of the hard dri­ves are eter­nal. If he has out­lived his own, and the oper­at­ing sys­tem was on it, then the com­put­er will be impos­si­ble. You will have to buy a new HDD (or rather, choose an SSD dri­ve), and then install the OS and all pro­grams. It will take a lot of time, but noth­ing can be done.

Does the computer give an error?

Win­dows may fail to boot in dif­fer­ent ways. In some cas­es, the com­put­er gives at least some kind of error. From it you can under­stand some­thing. For exam­ple, some­times the mes­sage “Disk boot fail­ure, insert sys­tem disk and press Enter” is writ­ten on a black back­ground. It says that the PC does not con­sid­er the C dri­ve as a sys­tem dri­ve. Name­ly, from it, we recall, Win­dows is usu­al­ly loaded. The rea­son for this can be com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent:

The BIOS is set to pri­or­i­tize boot­ing the sys­tem from a disk or USB dri­ve. And a flash dri­ve or opti­cal disk is just insert­ed into your com­put­er. Need to get them out. Bet­ter yet, go into the BIOS to change the boot order of the dri­ves in it.

The prob­lem may also arise due to the fact that the BIOS set­tings have gone astray. This may be due to a dead bat­tery. If you think this is the case, buy a new bat­tery. After you replace the old one, you will have to recon­fig­ure all set­tings, includ­ing the date and time. If you see that the BIOS detects your hard dri­ve, then the error will most like­ly dis­ap­pear and the oper­at­ing sys­tem will boot with­out any prob­lems.

It is pos­si­ble that the hard dri­ve is dam­aged. This is most strong­ly hint­ed at by his invis­i­bil­i­ty of the “bios”. Try dis­con­nect­ing it and then recon­nect­ing it to a dif­fer­ent SATA con­nec­tor. It is unlike­ly to help, but the attempt is not tor­ture.

If you have tak­en all the above steps, and the error per­sists, the prob­lem is most like­ly in the hard­ware. Try con­nect­ing the hard dri­ve to anoth­er com­put­er. If it is not deter­mined there, the HDD will have to be changed.

Also, when you turn on the PC, you may see the error “BOOTMGR is miss­ing”. This means that the com­put­er can­not find the boot entry. With what it can be con­nect­ed? Hon­est­ly, with any­thing. It is pos­si­ble that this entry was dam­aged by a virus. Also, even a par­tial fail­ure of the hard dri­ve leads to such a prob­lem.

To try to fix this error, you need to boot from the media that con­tains the dis­tri­b­u­tion of your oper­at­ing sys­tem. To do this, do not for­get to set the BIOS to the high­est boot pri­or­i­ty for the USB dri­ve. Next, you will need to go to the Win­dows Recov­ery Envi­ron­ment, where you should per­form the fol­low­ing steps:

1. Select “Sys­tem Restore”.

2. Fur­ther, it is pos­si­ble that you will need to select the oper­at­ing sys­tem whose recov­ery you need. After that, click the “Next” but­ton.

3. In the win­dow that opens, select “Com­mand Prompt”. The only chance to cor­rect the afore­men­tioned error lies pre­cise­ly in its use.

4. Here you need to enter the fol­low­ing com­mands: bootrec.exe /FixMbr and bootrec.exe /FixBoot — do not for­get to press the Enter key after each of them.

5. Restart your com­put­er. After that, go to the BIOS, now the hard dri­ve should have a high boot pri­or­i­ty.

6. If the error per­sists, you can go back to the com­mand line, where the fol­low­ing com­mand can the­o­ret­i­cal­ly help: bcdboot.exe c: / win­dows. It should start the process of restor­ing the boot of the oper­at­ing sys­tem.

The error “NTLDR is miss­ing” occurs much less fre­quent­ly. At the same time, the com­put­er also offers to reboot, but this does not help. This prob­lem is caused by improp­er shut­down of the com­put­er. It can also be caused by the activ­i­ty of virus­es. Be that as it may, for some rea­son the com­put­er can­not access the ntl­br file, which is nec­es­sary for the oper­at­ing sys­tem to boot cor­rect­ly. The way to solve this prob­lem may be dif­fer­ent. Let’s look at them all.

In the­o­ry, replac­ing a cor­rupt­ed ntl­dr. To do this, you can copy it from anoth­er com­put­er that has the same oper­at­ing sys­tem installed. You can also take it from the instal­la­tion dri­ve — you should look for it in the i386 fold­er. You will also need the ntdetect.com file, which is locat­ed in the same fold­er. Both files must be placed in the root of the sys­tem dri­ve, by doing this using anoth­er PC, con­nect­ing your HDD to it, or the Win­dows Recov­ery Con­sole. Next, the fol­low­ing steps will be required:

1. Boot from the Win­dows instal­la­tion disc (or from a bootable flash dri­ve).

2. Go to the recov­ery envi­ron­ment by click­ing the but­ton pro­vid­ed for this.

3. Next, you need to get into the boot par­ti­tion of the hard dri­ve. This can be done using the com­mand line, in which you need to write cd c: — after that, do not for­get to press the Enter key.

4. Exe­cute the fix­boot com­mand, con­firm its entry by press­ing the Y key.

5. Run the fixm­br com­mand. Con­firm your action by press­ing the same Y key.

6. When both com­mands com­plete suc­cess­ful­ly, enter the word exit. This should restart your com­put­er.

In some cas­es, the files are present, but for some rea­son the sys­tem par­ti­tion is no longer con­sid­ered active. To fix this prob­lem, it is rec­om­mend­ed to use the recov­ery envi­ron­ment men­tioned more than once. At the com­mand prompt, type fdisk — in the menu that appears, select the required active par­ti­tion, after which all that remains is to apply the changes. You can also use some boot disk for this pur­pose — for exam­ple,
Hiren’s boot CD or
Kasper­sky Res­cue Disk 18. Among the pro­posed tools, there will def­i­nite­ly be a util­i­ty for work­ing with hard disk par­ti­tions.

Blue screen of death with the message “Driver IRQL not less or equal”

If a blue screen occurs dur­ing Win­dows boot with the mes­sage “Dri­ver IRQL not less or equal”, there is a prob­lem with one or anoth­er dri­ver. It looks like it’s dam­aged. If this is some minor dri­ver (for exam­ple, need­ed for the print­er to work), then boot­ing in safe mode will help. To do this, restart or turn on the com­put­er, then press the F8 but­ton. You will be prompt­ed to select the boot mode — here you should select “Safe Mode”.

In this mode, you need to get rid of all minor dri­vers. Do not be afraid, then you can eas­i­ly install new ones that no longer con­tain an error. Well, if the blue screen of death also occurs when boot­ing in safe mode, this indi­cates that one of the main dri­vers is dam­aged. You will have to use the Win­dows Recov­ery Envi­ron­ment. But this time you need to go to the sec­tion through which you can return to one or anoth­er restore point. This will return the oper­at­ing sys­tem to the state it was in before installing the ill-fat­ed dri­ver.

Other issues

There are also sit­u­a­tions when the OS does not want to boot, while not issu­ing any mes­sages. In this case, you will have to exper­i­ment. For exam­ple, you can use one or anoth­er util­i­ty that serves to restore the hard­ware or the oper­at­ing sys­tem itself. For exam­ple, you can down­load a free appli­ca­tion to a flash dri­ve.
MHDD. It serves to check the hard dri­ve for bad blocks.

When you boot from a flash dri­ve, the pro­gram will ask you to select the chan­nel to which the hard dri­ve con­tain­ing the oper­at­ing sys­tem is con­nect­ed. Then you can do the fol­low­ing:

View SMART data This will allow you to find out a lot of all kinds of infor­ma­tion about the dri­ve. To view infor­ma­tion, press the F8 key.

Start scan­ning sec­tors for bad blocks. To do this, press the F4 key. At the same time, be sure to allow their cor­rec­tion by set­ting the switch near the “Remap” item to the “ON” posi­tion.

Please note that the process can take hours. Espe­cial­ly if the hard dri­ve has a large num­ber of bad sec­tors. That is why many experts rec­om­mend not test­ing the hard dri­ve, but mov­ing the area with the oper­at­ing sys­tem a lit­tle fur­ther deep into the hard dri­ve. This can real­ly help, because bad blocks are usu­al­ly con­cen­trat­ed at the begin­ning of the HDD. Move it 2 GB for­ward, that might be enough. For this pur­pose, a free pro­gram is usu­al­ly used.
Mini­Tool Par­ti­tion Wiz­ard DE. In it you need to use the “Move / Resize” item.

Above we have already talked about the blue screen of death. But it can also con­tain oth­er error text. For exam­ple, the sys­tem might write “PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA”. This usu­al­ly indi­cates a prob­lem with the RAM. It is pos­si­ble that you set the BIOS to a too high fre­quen­cy of its oper­a­tion. Or one of the bars ordered a long life.

You can test the RAM using a free util­i­ty
Memtest86. It can also be run from a bootable flash dri­ve or opti­cal disc. This pro­gram does not require any set­tings — it imme­di­ate­ly starts check­ing the RAM. As a result, you will see a mes­sage where the “Pass” col­umn indi­cates the num­ber of com­plet­ed cycles, and the “Errors” col­umn indi­cates the num­ber of detect­ed errors.

Conclusion

In fact, this is too volu­mi­nous a top­ic. You can eas­i­ly write a book about such a prob­lem — there are so many rea­sons why Win­dows refus­es to boot. Some­times even many com­put­er wiz­ards give up because of this. We can only hope that our mate­r­i­al still helped to restore your com­put­er to work­ing capac­i­ty. If none of the tips brought Win­dows back to life, then you have an atyp­i­cal prob­lem. And it is far from a fact that it will not do with­out replac­ing cer­tain com­po­nents.