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Windows has stopped booting. Advice needed please!
My PC has two SATA drives, for storage, and two 128GB SSDs. One of the SSDs has Microsoft Flight Simulator (FS9) installed on it. The second is divided into two partitions: the first has the O/S, the second Microsoft Flight Simulator X (FSX).
The first sign of trouble was when aircraft fuselage textures stopped loading in FS9. Eventually, when this didn't clear, I decided to reboot. After I did so, the FS9 SSD was completely missing from My Computer. Tried rebooting a couple more times. No joy, and the Asus BIOS splash screen was taking ages to move onto the Windows is starting up phase, so I assumed that the drive had failed. I unplugged the faulty SSD, and all was OK. For two or three reboots...
Then, rebooting once again a little later, all I got was, after the BIOS splash screen, a black screen with one line of strange characters. A few letters and numbers there, but mostly stuff like you might find in Wingdings font, musical notes, patterns and shapes. I took a photo of this. I can post it if really needed, but don't expect the exact string will help much. It's the same string of characters every time..
I booted using a BartPE DVD and went into the explorer utility. The O/S drive itself is clearly OK (it would be a bit much for both to fail in 30 minutes!) as both partitions on it, the one with the O/S and the one with FSX, are accessible in BartPE and I can browse through the various folders.
Also, the small System Reserved partition with a folder called 'Boot' and the bootmgr & Bootsect.bak files are there too.
I tried the boot repair option from the original Windows 7 x64 installation disc, but after running for some time and then telling me I should try to reboot, I got the same string of characters as before.
If the C drive and the System Reserved drive are there OK, any ideas why am I getting that string of characters and the PC won't boot any further? Another hardware problem somewhere???
I looked in the BIOS itself, but apart from the FS9 SSD not being listed, I saw no difference; but I am not too sure what I am looking for there to be honest.
Thanks for any help with troubleshooting this.
Martin
Last edited by martinlest; 14 Nov 2013 at 13:11.