Question PC wont boot

[hilts10]

My Windows 10 pc wont boot it just hangs there with with a flashing dash in the top left corner. I have another hard drive attached to my pc with windows 7 operating system, and when I connect that up it fires up fine so it is defiantly the other hard drive running Windows 10 and not any other hardware. Any of you experts any ideas / fixes for the problem ?

Thanks in advance.

 

[MacrosTheBlack]

How old's the hard drive? They don't last forever. If you go straight into the motherboard BIOS at boot up there are often options to run health tests on any attached hard drives.

 

[hilts10]

Its an 9 year old hard drive. Where abouts in BIOS is that.

Cheers.

 

[MacrosTheBlack]

Different location in different BIOS. Some don't have a test option. Google "bios hard drive test" and you will see some example. If you can find a manual for your motherboard online that would tell you.

If there's no test option, boot the windows 7 drive, plug in the bad drive when windows is up and see if it appears in Device Manager and Disk Management. If you can see it in My Computer you can run a health check from there.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2641432

If you can't see it in device manager or disk management then I suspect it's dead. 9 years old it certainly wouldn't be unusual.

 

[MarkE19]

There are many different BIOS/UEFI versions. So you would need to find it once in there.

Or download a diagnostics tool for the HDD, most makers have their own tools you can download for free.
for a Seagate drive - http://www.seagate.com/gb/en/support/downloads/seatools/
for a WD drive - WD Support
etc.

Or your laptop may have an installed diagnostics program, or their support area may have a diagnostics program you can download
Toshiba PC Diagnostic Tool

I've had the blinking cursor on some of our Lenovo laptops at work. I found that getting into the BIOS would then allow the laptop to boot normally, or even updating to a newer version of the BIOS resolved the issue.

So a bit of trial & error to find what works for your laptop.

Mark.

 

[MacrosTheBlack]

Don't think it's a laptop as there's more than one hard drive installed. But yes agree checking you have the latest version of the BIOS for your motherboard is a good idea.

 

[hilts10]

Its not a laptop its a Desktop Mark. Both hard drives are internal drives that I have switched over the cable. Maybe to obvious but if the Windows 7 hard drive works on the same motherboard then surely the motherboard is fine. Will try and find out what motherboard I have and try to update it.

Is there anything I can do in BIOS to try to get the faulty hard drive working ?

Cheers.

 

[MarkE19]

When I advised to run diagnostics I was thinking about the HDD rather than motherboard etc.

As the Win7 HDD boots ok it is not going to be something you can change in the BIOS to get the Win10 HDD to boot. But as previously mentioned you may well find access to the diagnostics tools from within the BIOS.

Mark.