A short power interruption affected my PC's ability to start.
A short power interruption affected my PC's ability to start.
I took a nap with the PC on, woke up later realizing it was off. My partner mentioned a brief power cut lasting about two seconds. I powered it back on and it stuck on the Asus boot screen with an endless spinning circle. Pressing power repeatedly got me into Safe Mode, which then transitioned to Repair Mode—only to see a black screen. Inside the UEFI everything looked normal, my drives recognized, but the motherboard didn’t show any lights and displayed a Q-Code A0. Windows didn’t seem to take over. I removed the GPU just to be safe. After setting up a Windows 11 Media USB, I booted from there. It quickly landed on a light blue screen with nothing visible except my cursor. This behavior was strange. Could point to a corrupted Windows file? Everything seems to function correctly otherwise. I’m worried about interfering with the BIOS right now. I’m currently under an ice storm and feel uneasy about working with unreliable power. My system specs are: CPU Intel Core i9-10900K, Asus ROG Z490-E Gaming, RTX 3080, G.Skill 3800mhz, 16GB RAM, Samsung 970 Evo SSD (2TB). A full reset would be frustrating. Please share your thoughts.
I tried once more and allowed the windows to load. It took longer than five minutes, followed by a quick disk check/repair. I managed to enter Windows but it felt unstable. Eventually, I shut it down naturally, though it took about five minutes to determine what went wrong. Then I saw these two error messages, saw a black screen, and it stayed on despite being powered on.
I would reposition the RAM and try another computer to create a bootable USB with Memtest86. This could indicate a memory problem. It's still uncertain if you managed to start Windows 11 from the boot media yet. A hardware memory issue seems likely.
Is your bootable USB properly set up? Use Rufus and reinstall Windows to assist.
I believe I resolved the problem. Oddly, Drive: E had difficulties and seemed to slow down the whole system. Drive: E was a Samsung 870 Evo 1TB SSD used mainly for a few games. After isolating it and removing the drive, everything functioned normally. When I connected an adapter to read its contents via USB, I found it shows zero bytes. I’ll check whether the drive is faulty or just corrupted. It’s a fairly new device.