Chronos 7 NP700Z5C suddenly won't boot or POST

The laptop has been working perfectly up until now. I woke it up from sleep and decided to reboot it. At that point, it tried to POST and then quickly shutoff, then started again, bringing me to the Windows Boot Manager screen. I tried hitting F4 to do a recovery and after I recovered from an old image, it still had the same behavior. I cannot get it to boot from a USB or from a CD. I've tried resetting the BIOS to stock. Literally nothing has changed prior to this.

I'm about to fill out a repair order to Samsung, but wanted to check here first.

Here is a video of the behavior.



Any ideas? Thanks.

 

It's great that you can boot into BIOS (F2) and Recovery (F4). That gives you options.

A lot of users are having problems with UEFI being disabled when it should be enabled, and vice versa, which can prevent Windows from booting or even seeing the disk. Sometimes it happens when BIOS is upgraded, but it could also happen if the CMOS somehow was lost.

So that would be my first suggestion: I assume this PC was delivered with Win8, which means its disk is GPT and UEFI should be enabled in BIOS. Check that OS Mode Selection = UEFI OS. If the opposite is true (this PC was delivered with Win7) you want to make sure that UEFI Boot = disabled in BIOS. (The NP700Z5C was produced in both configurations).

After that I would boot Recovery again (F4) and restore to Factory. If you can afford to have the disk wiped, I would use the option in Recovery to re-partition the drive as part of the restore. (The exact option depends on whether this is an older NP700Z5C with SRS5 or a newer one with SRS6).

In order to boot a CD/DVD or USB you need to have the following BIOS settings:

Fast Boot/Fast BIOS = disabled
Legacy USB boot = enabled (if you have that)
UEFI Boot = disabled (if this is an older NP700Z5C)
OS Mode Selection = UEFI & CSM OS (if this is a newer NP700Z5C)

Hope some of this helps. Please keep us posted

 

Well, I ended up finding a Win 8 disk and got it to boot to the disk after a couple tries. I did a "refresh" and so far so good. I planned on doing a refresh anyway to clear out all the bloatware, so this was a good thing. So far so good. I also updated the BIOS, as I noticed it was never updated. Not sure if that was a cause for the issue or not...

It certainly was something I've never seen before. I guess I'll cancel the repair request with Samsung. Thanks!

 

Good job there. Thanks for the update.

Yes, it sounds like the BIOS update could have been the cause. It often resets the BIOS settings, which causing UEFI settings to be changed. We get that fairly often on some models.

On 2013 models pre-installed with Win8, Refresh (run from inside Windows) doesn't remove bloatware -- which I thought at one point it did. Since yours also came with Win8, but is a 2012 model, I am curious if Refresh works differently for you, or whether it's because you ran it from Setup.