Stuck on BIOS Screen

K

kaho_tam

Member
I've received my custom laptop in October with the following specs:

Cosmos Series: 17.3" Matte HD+ LED 16:9 Widescreen (1600x900)
mSATA/M.2 SSD Drive 120GB Kingston SSDNow mS200 mSATA (upto 550MB/sR | 520MB/sW)
Memory - Hard Disk 2TB SERIAL ATA II 2.5" HARD DRIVE WITH 32MB CACHE (5,400rpm)

3 Year Standard Warranty

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After changing a setting on Windows 8 to disable pagefile on my C: (SSD) drive, my laptop is stuck on the "PC Specialist - Intel" screen forever. Pressing F2 or F7 doesn't bring me to the BIOS screen. What should I do?

Will I void my warranty if I unplug the SSD myself and try things out?
 
steaky360

steaky360

Moderator
Moderator
No you won't void your warranty if you unplug the SSD to try things out unless you damage something doing so.
 
ubuysa

ubuysa

The BSOD Doctor
Whilst you're inside the case pop the CMOS battery out and pop it back in again after a moment or two, see whether that helps. I can't imagine that the disabling of pagefile.sys would cause the problem you seem to have, Windows will boot and run quite happily without a pagefile - but some applications might not run properly (or at all) and an out of memory condition would be catastrophic (you don't say how much RAM you have).

Once you get Windows back rather than disable the pagefile move it to the hard disk, though at 5400rpm you'll notice if you do suffer page faults (i.e. use the pagefile as RAM). I've moved my pagefile (and the swapfile on Windows 8.1) to my HDD (7200rpm) but with 12GB RAM and zero use of metro apps I almost never use either (I have hibernation disabled so I don't use hiberfil.sys either). To be honest though modern SSDs have a wear cycle that is approaching that of a hard disk, so it's much less important to get the pagefile off the SSD. You might find your system runs much faster with it on the SSD and you bought the SSD for performance after all. :)
 
K

kaho_tam

Member
Removing the battery resets the bios does allow access to bios and allows booting by usb (earlier I was worried about hidden warranty void stickers hence the hesitation). i booted up the computer with ubuntu usb and renamed the pagefile.sys, hibernfil.sys, swapfile.sys in both the SSD and HDD. But with the default settings on BIOS, I can't boot into the SSD hence I disabled the UEFI boot.

So I disabled the UEFI boot setting on bios in attempt to boot up on windows again. The screen was still frozen at PC Specialist splash screen.... can't boot up with USB either with UEFI disabled.

Next I removed the button battery again (UEFI enabled now) and booted up system with my Windows setup usb. Unlike the ubuntu usb, the Windows usb seems to see the 120GB SSD as a blank disk hence was unable to fix the boot.

Can someone provide suggestions on what to do next? I really don't want to format the entire C: drive. Despite I have things backed up, I have hundreds of programs on it which will take me a whole week to setup...

thanks a lot!

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btw I moved the pagefile to HDD because I was drawing 3d art with particles which consumes 40gb of virtual memory. This takes up all my SSD. So I was experimenting with moving the pagefile to the HDD to check the speed...
 
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K

kaho_tam

Member
so it appears that the laptop will boot from the ssd with the hdd unplugged (uefi disabled)
but with uefi enabled, the hdd appears perfectly fine, except the laptop doesn't see the files/system on the ssd.....


why?????
 
K

kaho_tam

Member
ubuysa

ubuysa

The BSOD Doctor
I think now is a time to stop for a moment and take stock, or you're in anger of chasing Alice down the rabbit hole.....

The laptop worked perfectly when you took delivery in October. Yes?

Windows is installed using UEFI boot. Yes?

You have recently made changes (inc disabling the pagefile) and now it won't boot at all. Yes?

Resetting the BIOS by removing the CMOS battery allows booting but not into Windows. Yes?

Two things come to mind from all this...

1. Are you sure you have made no other recent changes (beyond disabling the pagefile)? This problem sounds like something is messed-up somewhere, so can you think of any other changes you have made recently (no matter how insignificant)?

2. UEFI booting has caused untold issues for large numbers of people. I quickly decided that the protection offered by UEFI was tiny compared with the hassle it creates. If this were mine I would start again and reinstall Windows using a standard BIOS/MBR boot, at least doing that you'll discover whether UEFI is the issue here - and it may well be.
 
K

kaho_tam

Member
It came with a trial version of Win 7 on non-UEFI. So when I decided to install Win 8 it was still on non-UEFI.

Anyway things are working fine now after switching from BIOS to UEFI. I probably won't touch it anymore. Thanks for everyone's help!



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ubuysa said:
I think now is a time to stop for a moment and take stock, or you're in anger of chasing Alice down the rabbit hole.....

The laptop worked perfectly when you took delivery in October. Yes?

Windows is installed using UEFI boot. Yes?

You have recently made changes (inc disabling the pagefile) and now it won't boot at all. Yes?

Resetting the BIOS by removing the CMOS battery allows booting but not into Windows. Yes?

Two things come to mind from all this...

1. Are you sure you have made no other recent changes (beyond disabling the pagefile)? This problem sounds like something is messed-up somewhere, so can you think of any other changes you have made recently (no matter how insignificant)?

2. UEFI booting has caused untold issues for large numbers of people. I quickly decided that the protection offered by UEFI was tiny compared with the hassle it creates. If this were mine I would start again and reinstall Windows using a standard BIOS/MBR boot, at least doing that you'll discover whether UEFI is the issue here - and it may well be.
Click to expand...
 
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