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Hope you can help. I own an Alienware 15 with Windows 10 64 bit installed. I upgraded sometime back in September. Windows 10 has given me some issues before such as slow start ups, random crashes, and the like, but such situations didn't happen often.

Now about a week ago, it started giving me a bunch of errors, but they were easily fixed. All was calm for a few days. Now it will not boot into any form of Windows 10 whatsoever. I can't boot into safe mode or regular mode. Every time I try I am plagued by the evil INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE error. It is driving me crazy. I know my hard drive is fine as I can still access my files through a live boot of Linux. I also ran diagnostics and everything is apparently working great.

Please help. I've asked a bunch of other forums and almost everyone just gives up and tells me to do a clean install. I really do not want to do that as I would lose tons of projects that I have for school. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

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  • "it started giving me a bunch of errors, but they were easily fixed" - can you tell us what the errors and their fixes were?
    – Jonno
    Feb 15, 2016 at 4:40
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    The main one would be that it would take a long time to log in and when it did, "Start Menu and Cortana Aren't Working." A simple restart fixed the problem. Later on I would occasionally just get an empty black screen. Restart also did the trick. @Jonno
    – Drake
    Feb 15, 2016 at 4:45

2 Answers 2

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Typical causes for this bugcheck could be:

  1. Changing your drive controller mode in your UEFI/BIOS. For example, from ATA to AHCI/RAID. If Windows doesn't have a driver to read the drive after this change, it'll attempt to boot but be unable to access your system partition.
  2. File system corruption. This is often the cause, and you could attempt to boot a Windows installation disk and run CHKDSK over the partition to see if it finds any issues.
  3. Failing hard drive. It sounds like you've managed to test this but it still could be due to Windows attempting to access parts of the disk Linux wasn't, causing an issue.

Firstly, if you're worried about your data and can access it from a Linux live boot, back up your important data before doing anything else. Copy it to an external USB device, with this issue it's hard to guarantee you won't lose any data.

Get a Windows installation disk and try running CHKDSK (Shift + F10 to get to a command prompt) across the partition to verify there isn't any file system corruption.

Verify that you haven't changed anything in the BIOS - be that from UEFI -<-> Legacy boot mode, or changing the SATA operation mode. Typically I'd expect you to be using AHCI, it might be worth trying changing this setting and seeing if there is any change in behaviour.

Beyond this, your hard drive could be at fault, although I'm not sure it's the most likely reason in this instance.

The problem with this particular bugcheck is there isn't a lot more to go on. No logs will be stored anywhere as if it were able to, there wouldn't be a problem in the first place.

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  • Yeah I still have it set on ATA. Changing it to AHCI had no difference. Running chkdsk gives me "The type of the file system is NTFS. Cannot lock current drive. Windows cannot run disk checking on this volume because it is write protected." Not sure what's the deal with that. @jonno
    – Drake
    Feb 15, 2016 at 5:53
  • @Drake Try using chkdsk C: /f /r /x
    – Jonno
    Feb 15, 2016 at 5:54
  • That started it. Now it just has an awfully long ETA. @jonno
    – Drake
    Feb 15, 2016 at 6:04
  • "Windows has scanned the file system and found no problems. No further action is required. " A bit further down it mentions "failed to transfer logged messages to the event log with status 50" @jonno
    – Drake
    Feb 15, 2016 at 21:14
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I ended up just resetting my PC. Fixed it up real nice.

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    Thanks for closing the loop on your question. The answer would be more helpful to others with a similar problem if you clarify what you mean by reset.
    – fixer1234
    Feb 19, 2016 at 6:14
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    For clarification, I went to the recovery menu which usually shows up after a failed automatic repair. If not you can boot it up with a recovery disk or installation media. Go to advanced troubleshooting options. Reset my PC should be there.
    – Drake
    Feb 20, 2016 at 4:52

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