Need help with Win 10 repair

[Rocky_53 1,566]

At first I thought I was having issues with P3D v4 but it looks more like that Win 10 is the culprit. I've embarked on a mammoth reinstall of Win 10 and P3D V4 and so today I have installed Acronis, 3 FSDT airports and TrackIR. I went on my first proper flight out to the mountains around Zurich. After about 30 minutes I was on final to a small airfield when the whole sim crashed. It froze completely, with nothing to do other than switch off at the power button. On rebooting, the whole system went at a snail's pace and took about 5 minutes to open P3D. I decided to reboot and after doing so I got a series of beeps and a blue screen saying: System thread exception not handled  clfs.sys. Having done some research, it appears this is not uncommon. It also seems a repair of Win10 would be a good option, although this is proving difficult because I can't get into safe mode and I can't get into Windows. In fact I'm a little stumped as to the best way forward. I'm also worried that a repair may injure some of the files on the C: drive. I understand it will give me the option to retain the files, but I also understand that 'apps' will be lost?? Unsure what is meant by apps and hope that does not mean anything relating to scenery or aircraft control panels. Any help would be truly appreciated. Cheers fellas.

[bobbyjack 61]

There are some admin cmd routines you can try first. For example sfc /scannow. This checks the Windows file system for corrupt files and replaces them. Google it to find out how to use it. 

[vortex681 806]

21 hours ago, Rockliffe said:

I got a series of beeps...

The beeps are often a good indicator of what's going wrong. If you count them you can go to https://www.computerhope.com/beep.htm and find out what they mean (they're often associated with hardware errors).

[DaveCT2003 1,820]

1. Do what vortex681 said above.  Note that you likely have a LED alpha/numeric display on the motherboard that will also provide you some valuable information  - should be able to decode what it means in your motherboard manual.

2. Unplug your computer from the power source.

3. Open your computer case and inspect everything. Look for cards - especially memory, that aren't seated properly. Make sure there aren't any open wires touching the case.

4. Unplug everything except the keyboard, mouse, speakers and monitor from the back of your computer, then reconnect the power source to your computer.

5.  Consult your motherboard manual and find the CMOS reset switch (momentary push switch).  Press the switch and hold down for 10 seconds (10 seconds is not absolutely necessary).

6. Attempt to boot the computer back up. If it works, great. If not, count the beeps and proceed down the path of troubleshooting a hardware error (Step 1 above).

 

If after the above you're still having the same problem and you're not computer savvy, you might consider taking your computer to a repair facility (or back where you got it if it's still under warranty).

[Rocky_53 1,566]

Hey guys, thanks all so much for the advice, but after spending all day yesterday trying to sort it, I've got my PC guru coming over tomorrow. Really unsure what the issue is. I can't even boot from an ISO installation USB drive to repair Win10. Even though I've prioritised the boot drive etc etc. It just won't get past the error message. Then it shows it's going into repair mode and then starts rebooting itself and goes on a circular cycle. I'm really miffed, as I have been so careful to do the original install of Win10 and P3D V4, it's clearly something bad. Anyway, I hope tomorrow if we can perform a Win 10 repair it will be OK.

[Luke 782]

If you're getting blue screens and can't even boot my suspicion is either a bad overclock (if you're lucky) or a hardware problem.

Cheers!

 

[bobbyjack 61]

Yup, sounds  a lot like when my hard drive went bad.

[Rocky_53 1,566]

[SteveW 1,792]

Sorry to hear about this Howard. I hope your PC guy can spot something.

[vortex681 806]

On 04/09/2017 at 10:26 PM, Rockliffe said:

I've got my PC guru coming over tomorrow.

Did you get your system sorted?

[Rocky_53 1,566]

2 hours ago, SteveW said:

Sorry to hear about this Howard. I hope your PC guy can spot something.

 

1 hour ago, vortex681 said:

Did you get your system sorted?

Thanks for your concern guys, appreciated. He was a little confused as to why it wouldn't boot from the repair disc. But having been searching Google, it is not uncommon and I think it has something to do with a setting in BIOS, nothing to do with the boot order but more to do with UEFI (???) Anyway, I hope to hear from him tomorrow, so whatever the outcome I'll let you guys know.

[vortex681 806]

1 minute ago, Rockliffe said:

But having been searching Google, it is not uncommon and I think it has something to do with a setting in BIOS, nothing to do with the boot order but more to do with UEFI

Howard, I had a vaguely similar problem with Windows 10 when I first installed it. It seemed to go into a boot loop and often took a number of restarts to get into Windows. After a lot of troubleshooting I finally came up with a solution which worked. I had three drives in my system at the time - one SSD (the primary boot drive) and two hard drives. The boot sequence in the BIOS was the SSD followed by the hard drives and then a USB device. I found that by putting one of the non-system hard drives as the first in the sequence (even though I couldn't actually boot from it) followed by the SSD it booted reliably into Windows every time. I'm still not entirely sure why this worked but I suspect that the SSD needed a very slight delay before it began the startup sequence (a wild guess). It might be worth a try if your guru doesn't come up with a solution.

[Rocky_53 1,566]

10 minutes ago, vortex681 said:

Howard, I had a vaguely similar problem with Windows 10 when I first installed it. It seemed to go into a boot loop and often took a number of restarts to get into Windows. After a lot of troubleshooting I finally came up with a solution which worked. I had three drives in my system at the time - one SSD (the primary boot drive) and two hard drives. The boot sequence in the BIOS was the SSD followed by the hard drives and then a USB device. I found that by putting one of the non-system hard drives as the first in the sequence (even though I couldn't actually boot from it) followed by the SSD it booted reliably into Windows every time. I'm still not entirely sure why this worked but I suspect that the SSD needed a very slight delay before it began the startup sequence (a wild guess). It might be worth a try if your guru doesn't come up with a solution.

Hiya, I have just this minute got off the phone from my PC man. It seems he has got to the bottom of things. He took the OS drive out and tried it in two other PCs and it just blue screened. He then tried it on a Linux machine and it worked. It seems after further investigation there was a corrupted partition. He went on to say that all the data and everything on the main partition still appears to be intact, which is good, but there's no way of discovering what caused the corruption in the first place. Hmmm, I thought, it happened the day after I had installed Acronis 2016!!! Could this be what caused it? He didn't think so, but he also didn't rule it out either.

 

[vortex681 806]

21 minutes ago, Rockliffe said:

Hmmm, I thought, it happened the day after I had installed Acronis 2016

Whilst Acronis never did anything like that for me, I stopped using it a few years ago and switched to Macrium Reflect for one, fundamental, reason. The only time I ever tried to use it in anger to restore a hard drive, it didn't work! It claimed that none of my backups were valid Acronis files even though they had all been created with the same version of Acronis that I was using to try to restore the drive. Fortunately I had separate data-only backups created with a batch file so the important stuff wasn't lost. I know that a lot of people swear by Acronis but this ruined my faith in the software.

Macrium Reflect has been flawless. I use the paid version and occasionally restore just a file or a single folder from the backup just to check that it's still valid.

[Rocky_53 1,566]

1 minute ago, vortex681 said:

Whilst Acronis never did anything like that for me, I stopped using it a few years ago and switched to Macrium Reflect for one, fundamental, reason. The only time I ever tried to use it in anger to restore a hard drive, it didn't work! It claimed that none of my backups were valid Acronis files even though they had all been created with the same version of Acronis that I was using to try to restore the drive. Fortunately I had separate data-only backups created with a batch file so the important stuff was not lost. I know that a lot of people swear by Acronis but this ruined my faith in the software.

Macrium Reflect has been flawless. I use the paid version and occasionally restore just a file or a single folder from the backup just to check that it's still valid.

Hmm, actually, I said it was the day after I installed Acronis, but in actual fact it was just later the same day. So effectively straight after I had installed the darn thing! My PC man is not a great advocate of such software, he suggests I get a nice big HD and simply clone the drives across. I think I will do that. Or I may look at your recommendation for Macrium Reflect.