I did pretty much nothing on the weekend. That nothing included not buying toilet paper unlike some idiots out there. I think I have about seven rolls left. Since I live alone, I’m probably good for another week or so. As I mentioned though, I limited my outside activities. I had planned on visiting a breakfast place but chose not to. I was also going to shop at T&T to get supplies for hot pot but I decided against it. I was also going to buy a new SSD at a local computer shop but those plans changed as well. I need to go into detail about that.
In my last post, I wrote about how my desktop computer chose this perfect time to stop booting into Windows. I originally thought it was a faulty SSD because when I cloned the disk to a spare mechanical drive, my computer started working again. I went to bed on Saturday night thinking this was the case. On Sunday morning, I woke up and tried to turn on my computer. I was met with this new error: “Reboot and Select Proper Boot Device”. Essentially, this means my computer can’t find a hard drive where it can see an operating system. Restarting the computer would just cause the same error to appear again. Going into the BIOS, it could see all my drives but it didn’t know one of them had Windows on it. I swapped between the spare mechanical drive and my old SSD probably a dozen times on Sunday, and it didn’t seem to matter, I got the same error again. I tried several different solution I found on Google and none of them seemed to work.
On one of my last attempts, with the mechanical drive in, I somehow got it to recognize Windows on it and my computer started Windows properly. It was at this point that I realized that I could not shut down my computer as I probably wouldn’t be able to start it again without some random miracle. I did a test and I can confirm that I can put it to sleep but a complete shutdown or a restart is not possible. I also recognized that Windows updates can cause restarts, so I’ve paused updates for 35 days, the maximum allowable by Windows 10.
Obviously, this is not a permanent solution as a computer normally needs to be shut down or at least restarted for many different reasons. I just need this computer working while I’m working from home for the rest of this month. So, what is the actual fix? I’m not sure at this point. I’m going on the assumption that both these drives are working fine, so my next logical guess would be the motherboard. Less likely, though I can’t rule it out, would be the power supply. Replacing computer parts is a hassle even during the best of times but in these uncertain days, it becomes even more problematic, especially since it’s so crucial to my job now.
We’ll see how far I can get with a computer that cannot be shut off. It should be interesting.