Do I need to fix my BIOS?
Do I need to fix my BIOS?
I am new to computers and I know very little about them, so sorry if your area is wrong. Here are several problems that need fixing, and I'm working on each one step by step. It all started with me trying to copy a Toshiba 1TB hard drive onto a Western Digital Blue 1TB SSD using Acronis software. Acronis asks for a restart that will boot into its own settings before starting the copy process. After restarting, the computer doesn't turn on properly. The monitor lights stay yellow even after I wait five minutes. It turns blue only when something actually happens, but it stayed yellow during this time. After many restarts and some minor changes to my setup, the same thing happened. Then, I tried booting from a USB stick with Acronis Recovery, but that didn't work either. At this point, I'm wondering if my computer is even turning on at all anymore. I tried pressing F1, F2, F8, F10, and the suggested DEL key during startup, but nothing happened. Sometimes, if I did those things, it would simply not turn on or boot up. Then I found a method that says to hold SHIFT while restarting. I went into a menu like Windows 8, looking for an UEFI option that should be there for most computers, but nothing appeared there either. To sum up, at this point I am really not sure if my computer has BIOS functionality anymore, even though it sounds weird. This is driving me crazy because I checked the BIOS before to make sure new parts were working right. Google searches aren't helping much, YouTube isn't giving good answers, and Acronis forums have similar but different problems. Now I am hoping for some idea here. Any kind of info will help at this point. My motherboard is a Gigabyte Z77-HD3.
You are giving mixed answers: You can't start up, but then a "Windows 8 escape menu" pops up (it does start). So what's wrong? Maybe you can't get Windows to run, or maybe you can't open the BIOS menu. Also, don't tell me exactly what you did to your hard drives. Did you take out all the old ones? Was there an error message from Acronis? Have you tried booting with the old drive? Were there problems before you made that copy job?
I am sorry for the confusing info. I will try to be specific here. The real issue is that I cannot get into the BIOS. I managed to copy the drive anyway, so we can skip that part for now. (It was running in the background but did not show any screen text after it restarted.) Trying to use Function keys to enter BIOS seems to cause a bad boot. This means the computer turns on, but no info shows up on the monitor. Pressing the power button right now causes an instant shutdown. It is better than sitting there and holding down the button for a forced shut down (I am not sure if this is just my system or if it happens everywhere). There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with Windows 10. I don't see a UEFI Firmware Settings option in the escape menu. This was something I thought of, but could it be a problem with integrated graphics and my graphics card? Not really sure why, though I came across a video saying Acronis hates multi-monitor enabled options and won't display info if they are on. But either way, I am having trouble getting into the BIOS, no matter what happens with Acronis or not.
I think we wait about the cloning process (we haven't used Acronis, I personally trust Clonezilla for this kind of job). The reason is that if there is a problem with memory or RAM, other programs could fail - so we don't spend time on software before we know what's wrong with hardware. Personally I haven't heard about a GPU that causes such problems with the system. But rare issues can't be ruled out like that, just saying I haven't heard of this before. Need you to answer this in order to proceed : Do the bios allow you to enter boot menu (the menu that offers you to manually select boot media)? And this: When running Windows - Do you experience any odd behavior from the computer? Does it work fine when running games and other CPU/GPU intensive tasks? And this: Are you running the CLONED copy of the hard drive, or are you still running (booting from) the original hard drive? Here is the thing I would like you to do (test procedure): - If the computer is able to boot from a CD/DVD drive, I want you to get Memtest86+, either from the Memtest86+ official website or from the UBCD toolkit. I recommend the latter because it contains many useful tools to check other hardware as well. After that, have Memtest to run overnight and see if it outputs any error.
Forgot about this thread already? The issue came up when I couldn't get into the BIOS after restarting my computer. It was kind of embarrassing because the screen only showed up on my second monitor, which had no power. But the actual computer didn't care much; it just said everything is okay there. So remember: make sure all your monitors are on when you're troubleshooting, or even better, stick to using one at a time.