Troubleshooting boot problems

- There are a ton of questions on the CompTIA A+ that cover Windows Operating System troubleshooting, so what I'm going to be doing over these next few episodes is covering that exact issue. Now, you can make Windows troubleshooting a lot easier if you break it down into chunks. I basically break all Windows operating system problems into three pieces. The first piece are the boot problems. Now, when I'm talking about a boot problem, I'm saying the computer has booted up, but it can't find Windows, or Windows is really messed up and it can't even start Windows because Windows is messed up. The second one is Windows is trying to load, but it never really gets to a desktop, or something bizarre happens, and the bottom line is you can't really log into the system. The third one is you can log into Windows and you're at a desktop, but bizarre things are happening. Error screens are popping up, the computer's freezing, or the dreaded blue screen of death. So what I want to do is talk about these three different things, and I want to start with the very basic one which the A+ calls a black screen, which I think is actually kind of funny because first of all what is a black screen? So you got to be really careful here. You could have say a laptop that all of a sudden it goes to a black screen because it's in a hibernate mode and you're having trouble getting it out of hibernate mode. So when we get into laptops, we're going to talk about hibernate and all that kind of stuff. Is the computer actually turned on? I can't tell you how many times people have called me up at my very expensive hourly rate only to find me walk over and go, "Try it again." Okay, so don't let those sneak by you. The other issue that you could run into is that is there a problem with, for example, your boot order? So we'll talk about that in a second. The one black screen of death, and this one terrifies me 'cause it's a real pain, is that your computer is booting up. It's booting up; in fact, Windows is actually running. But because the screen is black, I feel compelled to talk about this right now, and that is device driver issues. Nothing causes more pain and anguish than device drivers, in particular for graphics cards. Especially if you've installed a new graphics card and you've had the audacity to update a driver or something like that, and all of a sudden you boot up, and you can hear your computer booting, (imitates computer beeping) and everything sounds happy, and the hard drive's going (imitates hard drive whirring), but all of a sudden the screen is black. My friends, you have a problem with a device driver, and you've got to get to it. So let's talk about that real quick. Number one, you've got to get into safe mode. So in other episodes, we talk about the different ways to get into safe mode, and that particular situation since everything's going black, you're probably going to have to be rebooting the computer multiple times. But you will get into safe mode, and then you have to get into the device driver and do some roll backs. So we're going to pretend that my system's actually in safe mode right now, and let's take a look at what I'm going to be doing here. I'm going to boot the system up and I'm in safe mode, so if this is causing trouble, he's still going to be there but he's just not going to be really working. But what I can do is this: I'm going to right-click and you see I've got some options here. Don't worry about these options. Let's go into Properties, and this is where exciting stuff happens. Number one, I'm going to be taking a look at the driver itself, and it can give me details. For example, watch the driver versions. It blows me away how techs don't take time to understand driver versions, particularly for graphics cards. I've got these things memorized like my social security number because they continue to be issues over and over again. I may not know the exact version number for all my Nvidia cards at any given moment, but I can get pretty close. There are tons of websites that cover this type of stuff. Just like operating system patches have been known to come out bad from time to time, we have the exact same problem with the device drivers. And especially if you're using Windows Update and you're automatically updating the device drivers, some of this stuff will load and you have absolutely no real control on it. Well, at least if you're aware of these things, you can boot into safe mode, you can look at a driver version and go, "Ah, yep, that's the bad one." So what are you going to do about it? Well, your first buddy is rollback. Right now, mine's grayed out because this is the only time I've installed this one. I know it's pretty dated, but it's the only time I've installed it. And I could at this point hit roll back, and it will roll back to the previous driver that was installed. I could also update. A lot of times if something goes wrong, folks, especially Nvidia's very good about this, they'll go ahead and, "Oops, we'll fix that, and we'll give you a new driver that takes care of whatever that particular problem was." You could also disable it. Disabling is a very, very powerful tool, and especially for something like a graphics card, you go, "Well, Mike, if I disable this, I won't have a monitor." Yes, you will. Windows will default to a very basic video and you'll at least have an ugly screen, but you'll have a screen. The other big problem you'll run into when you have black screen issues that are device-oriented is that something happened to make that particular device go kaboom, and these things are all recorded automatically within Windows. You just have to know where to look for these events. Events? You want to view the events? That's right, event viewer. Event viewer is basically built in to the properties of any particular device. Let me show you what I mean. So you come over to Events, and it will have timestamps for certain things that have taken place, but if you want to, you can actually zoom in on this, and go right into good old event viewer. Now look what it does. It actually pulls up just for one specific device, so this is very, very convenient. It's basically the same information you see here, but it gives you a little bit more. So for example, if I zoom in on this, I'm going to get all kinds of Google de gok here that might give me some information about the problem. What you're going to be looking for is the last event before everything went kaboom. No, you're not going to be able to read all that stuff. I can't either. But a quick cut and paste into any web browser, and you're going to discover you are one of 50 million people who've already had that problem, and a fix will be there ready to go. All right, now in this particular case, we're talking about something that is, in my opinion, not a true black screen because Windows actually booted up, but I think it's important to bring that up. When I'm talking about first layer problems, I'm talking about Windows can't even boot up. In fact, a lot of times it can't even find Windows. And the number one cause of this pain more than anything else are thumb drives. Thumb drives are great, but the problem is is that your boot order in your system setup may boot to these guys. Especially if you've got like a Linux installation ISO on here or something like that, you could wreak havoc on some poor person who thinks that they're walking into a Windows system and one day they fire up their computer and it's, "Would you like to install Ubuntu?" (chuckles) Okay, I don't get out a lot. For me, this stuff is funny. Anyway, boot order is a big deal. What you need to be doing is that if you get any type of black screen, or if you get errors, for example, no operating system available, find another boot device and press Enter, these types of errors, the first thing you need to do is scan around. Do you have a thumb drive in there? Do you have something in there that's messing with your boot order? Secondly, if you're really unsure, go into your system setup and reset your boot order to make sure you're booting off your Windows drive first, and then that way you can get around that problem. The other big issue that we run into that makes screens just black is that you've done something. Now, this often still points to devices, but it can, adding a new hard drive, adding more RAM. A lot of times in a hardware issue, it's going to prevent Windows from even being located. In these particular cases, the right answer is just undo what you just did and see if Windows boots up. That way you can zero in on a particular piece of hardware. And again, you're never on the bleeding edge of these problems. Anything that's gone wrong has already happened to 50,000 other people. This is where you pull up your laptop or your phone, you type in the issue, and you're going to find a forum somewhere that's going to give you the answer that you need. Now, if Windows itself, the boot files for Windows corrupts, that can be a big problem. Luckily for us, WinRE does a great job of this. So what we can do with WinRE is just go ahead and use your repair thumb drive, or if you don't have anything else, your installation media, go into your WinRE, do a repair install, or people always skip this one, but it works pretty good, is that you can actually do a rolling back to a particular point in the past and then just see what happens. A lot of times, it's a bit of guesswork in here and you'll be in good shape. If it's really corrupted, you probably have a hard drive issue and you're reinstalling Windows from scratch anyway. Have fun with that; good thing you got a back up, huh?