Hanging on blue startup screen, endless spinning dots.

[Dlovinger]

I returned home from work today to find that my computer won't boot. Great, it's going to one of those weeks... After the bios screen and the windows 10 logo, the computer hangs on the following screen, blue background with the spinning white dots. It looks like it's trying to log in, but it gets stuck. The dots never freeze, or at least not in the hour or two I've left it- it just keeps spinning and trying to log in. Before I go further, I'll give you some specs:

Homebuilt Windows 10 desktop, up to date (upgraded from w7 months ago)
Gigabyte z87x ud3h mobo
Haswell i5-4670k
Nvidia 780ti
8gb ram

Ok, where was I. The strange part about this is that everything was working fine yesterday, and I didn't really do anything since then. I upgraded from W 7 to 10 months ago and it's been working fine. There were no windows updates yesterday (Feb 22nd), and I didn't install any other driver or system updates. In fact the only things I did install were the Steam VR test and a game on steam. There's nothing else I can think of that has changed since it was last working.

Now, onto what I've tried. I'm at a bit of an impasse here because I can't really get the computer to do anything. Booting into bios works, but that's about it. I can't get into safe mode (thanks W10, F8 doesn't work, can't restart into it from desktop, or from login screen). If anyone knows another way, let me know. I've messed around with cables inside the tower, plugged and unplugged hard drives. In the course of restarting many times, I got a "bios corrupt" error, after which it started recovering into the secondary bios (losing all my OC settings and other bios settings). But the problem persisted. I then tried updating my bios, but I keep getting "invalid file" messages when I try to update from bios/Qflash. I also don't not have a W10 recovery stick (which I suppose I should have had around? I can't just download this somewhere huh?).

Anyway, I think this sums things up. Let me know if you need any more info, or if you have any ideas on how to continue from here. Thank you very much.

 

[Flynn]

I have the same problem too just happened to me today aswell.

 

[Flynn]

Hi, I've just resolved my problem and hopefully yours, there were too many external devices plugged into my computer (aux, my usb salt lamp etc) anyway when I removed these it booted up fine.

 

[Dlovinger]

Hi, I've just resolved my problem and hopefully yours, there were too many external devices plugged into my computer (aux, my usb salt lamp etc) anyway when I removed these it booted up fine.

Hi Flynn. I'm glad you figured out your problem. And it boots fine afterward, with everything connected? Strange.. But, unfortunately that didn't do it for me. I wonder if that would have worked before messing with bootrec, etc.

 

[davehu]

Same problem this morning, except I hadn't installed or updated anything for a few weeks. everything worked yesterday but this morning nothing but the spinning circles. I read everything I could (using my CHROMEBOOK!) with no answers. But I noticed that the system would go into standby when I used the standby key.. And I noticed that it even went into standby itself after 20 minutes. I could even shut the system down using the power button but when powering back up it went back into the spinning circles. no other keys worked, other than the standby key. Big problem is that I had neglected to make a recovery drive. So I thought I'd try something, knowing that sometimes if the power is cut off sometimes the system will bring up the safe mode option. So I pulled the plug on the computer and then powered up. It then booted up as if nothing had happened. I am know making a recovery drive as I type!