What the eff is going on???

[GRoston]

We have a Windows 7 computer whose sole purpose is watching TV. It does nothing other than play videos I have loaded to the machine or stream stuff from Netflix, etc. We were watching a Netflix show this evening when the system acted up, then rebooted. Once it rebooted, it presented a screen that said:

EFI Shell version 2.31 (4.654)
Current running mode 1.1.2
Map: Cannot find required map name

At this point, I could enter the BIOS, but was unable to get the system to reboot to Windows. What on earth should I try?

Note: I replaced the CR2032 battery on the motherboard and set Overclocking -> memory fast boot to disabled. No change.

 

[ssokolow]

We have a Windows 7 computer whose sole purpose is watching TV. It does nothing other than play videos I have loaded to the machine or stream stuff from Netflix, etc. We were watching a Netflix show this evening when the system acted up, then rebooted. Once it rebooted, it presented a screen that said:

EFI Shell version 2.31 (4.654)
Current running mode 1.1.2
Map: Cannot find required map name

At this point, I could enter the BIOS, but was unable to get the system to reboot to Windows. What on earth should I try?

The first thing I'd suspect from the described symptoms is that the hard drive died. (It sounds like it acted up and rebooted because the hard drive started speaking nonsense to the OS and then, when the system tried to find a boot partition, it failed over to the next option which is your motherboard's EFI shell.

(It reminds me of when my mother's laptop's SSD failed and, since she was plugged in using wired Ethernet, she found herself in the "Apple Internet Recovery but for vintage PCs" network boot environment I set up... every elder should have a family member with a CompSci degree on hand. )

See if the drive still shows up as found in your "BIOS" (i.e. UEFI) settings and, if it does, try booting the machine off a recovery USB stick that has or can ramdrive-install a utility that you can use to inspect the drive's failure logs and run self-tests.

(I'd probably grab one of the Kubuntu or Lubuntu Linux install sticks I have lying around, choose the "Try ..." option in the selector to get a desktop running off the USB, and then `sudo apt-get install smartmontools`, but I'm comfortable with the CLI for that.)

 

[GRoston]

The drive is a relatively new SSD drive and it is connected to either SATA port 1 or 2. From the BIOS, I went to Settings->System Status, and the note next to both SATA Port1 and SATA Port2 is 'Not present'. Could the drive have died? I will try resetting the cable and plugging it into the external SATA port on my desktop...

 

[ssokolow]

The drive is a relatively new SSD drive and it is connected to either SATA port 1 or 2. From the BIOS, I went to Settings->System Status, and the note next to both SATA Port1 and SATA Port2 is 'Not present'. Could the drive have died? I will try resetting the cable and plugging it into the external SATA port on my desktop...

It certainly could have died. Warranties are the reason storage is as affordable as it is. Manufacturers QA test up to the point where the cost of testing balances out with the cost of servicing warranties.

However, do also try with a different SATA cable to rule that out. It's uncommon, but they can be bad.

EDIT: I actually just bought another WD Blue SATA SSD as part of making the machines in my collection of older PCs run as quiet as possible. (I buy WD Blue because WD and Samsung are the only brands I can get around here without stupid markups which I don't see people calling failure-prone and it doesn't make sense to pay racecar engine prices for something I'm going to put into a go kart, so no Samsung... plus, I know WD's RMA process works well for me.)

 

[A Guy]

A number of videos that purport to fix this

Google Search

A Guy

 

[ssokolow]

A number of videos that purport to fix this
Google Search
A Guy

...and the links cover things like "check that you didn't leave one of the cables disconnected", which are not useless... but are much less likely to be helpful than the specific response I gave to the described symptoms.

I feel a great deal of dissonance between your reputation as a user and the "A.I. spam" quality of that post.

 

[A Guy]

There are tons of posts online for a common problem. This guy doesn't just say plug in cable...you chose to comment on that one

I was helping here 15 years before you joined...and frankly I could care less for your opinion

A Guy

 

[GRoston]

Tried the stuff mentioned, but nothing worked. Brought the SSD to a decent computer shop, they checked it and found that it was dead. Now the fun beings...