Clevo 170HM3 won't boot! Help!

An hour or two before this post I had just shut down the system normally. Now it won't boot to Windows and for unknown reasons tries to boot from the Ethernet controller with PXE-E53: no boot file and received.

I've checked the BIOS and my OS HDD is detected with boot order putting it at P0, top of the boot sequence order.

I've never seen this before and am in a panic as I have a deadline next Monday. What should I do?

 

Sounds like you may have to run "bootrec / fixmbr" to recover your Master Boot Record:

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/32523/how-to-manually-repair-windows-7-boot-loader-problems/

 

That requires a Windows 7 installation disk right? That's going to be a problem since I don't have that on hand.

Just visited a PC shop and they suspect it's a HDD failure (surprising on an Intel SSD with Smart reading at 85%). I'm not able to even get to command prompt because the PC keeps trying to boot up through the Ethernet connection.

 

You can boot from a Windows PE which has 'bootrec' included:

https://community.sophos.com/kb/en-us/108805

 

I'm using W7 Ultimate, so which of the links in that URL is applicable? I've never used Sophos encryption or SafeGuard before so don't know how to proceed.

 

You can try to do a Windows repair using the Windows 7 disc https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows7 you an download from here.


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Thanks for the suggestions and help so far, but now the machine won't even turn on from battery.

I'll have to conclude it's some kind of catastrophic SSD failure or the laptop's power supply is borked in some way. Hopefully data retreival is still possible.

 

If you haven't tried this yet.... Or haven't gotten it fixed.

1: Make sure power is plugged in. Sometimes you need to disconnect battery and reconnect it to get it to power back on.
2: Hit power button and within 2 seconds start hitting the F8 key once every 1 second till you see the advanced safe mode menu.
3: First time you will select boot last known good configuration. Hopefully this will fix it. Provide you system can boot the recovery partition.
4: If that does not work then try it again and this time select boot command prompt. Then you will try Premas command to attempt to fix the boot record. bootrec.exe /? will give you a list of 4 commands that can be run at this point. Then boot normal and if it works, your os will come alive. It might take longer than usual and possibly a second reboot, but still a good sign.
5: You can always take the drive out to get your important work off and put it on a temp machine.
6: As long as the SSD drive is not in a hardware failure state you are in a better place, but if not. Recovery will be very expensive. Lets hope that is not the case here or are you talking about a Hdd?
7: There is a usb flash repair disc that is capable of booting your os, but you would need a pc to down load the file and a flash drive formated with said files put on it.....

 

I've already sent it to a repair shop and am expecting collection today. Prognosis isn't good for data retrieval (despite being a SSD drive) because of some kind of cluster failure which stopped the drive from being recognised.

1. Motherboard error apparently from switching on and off while trying to show the repair person the problem. Now fixed.
2. F8 wouldn't work since the SSD wasn't being recognised.
3. Ditto 2.
4. Ditto 2.
5. Repair personnel said the drive itself wasn't dead and could recover quite a bit of data but not all of it.
6. See first part of message.
7. Too late from what I heard since it was more than simply a MBR issue.

 

Ah, sorry to hear that!!
We recover ssd's if there is no physical damage. Same for HDD's.
Thanks for the reply.