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Spinning Dots at Boot Up


I have win 10 x64 on a Dell XPS 8700. It had Win 8.1. Been on Win 10 since release. Today my son went to reboot the computer and at boot, just got spinning dots. He turned it off, same thing. Got to a diagnostic and it said it could not repair. So I decided to use Acronis 2016 to restore the weekly image from Sunday. Acronis said restore was successful, but same thing, Just spinning dots under the dell logo.

Any Ideas?

i just did a reset and now same thing is happening. I am at a loss.

Spent the night working on this and no luck.

First, the drive is a Samsung 850 SSD (256GB). I upgraded to that shortly after I got the system in Arpil. I still have the original dell drive with 8.1 on it. So I tried booting to that and it boot fine. So I do not think this is a hardware issue.

I tried restoring two different acronis images to the SSD thinking one might be bad. Both said succeeded but the same issue happens with the spinning dots. I also tried restoring to a new hard drive (instead of SSD a 2TB I have) and same thing.

I put the SSD in another computer and with the Samsung Magician software it said the drive is fine. There was a firmware update for it so I updated the firmware. I also wiped the drive using diskpart (clean command) to delete the EUFI partition thinking why not at this point. I have not tried another restore yet.

Anyone have any ideas?

thanks

Have you tried a clean install? Could have been that the boot manager was/is corrupt.. A lot of people that used Acronis have reported problems with it's imaging saying ok good, but upon re-image it sometimes fails or corrupts in Windows 8 & 10. Try using Macrium, Reflect Free. Reflect also has a built in boot repair in the WinPE recovery environment, should something happen.

Thanks for the reply. I am pulling my hair out on this.

I have not tried a clean install. do I need to go back to win 8.1 first and then upgrade?

I find it odd that i got the issue of the spinning dots and then the re-image the same thing. I am wondering if something else is going on. If acronis failed, I would assume the might be some other type of issue. Also, I tried using the reset with keeping my files but had the same results.

FYI, I did use acronis with win 8.1 when I go the new SSD to go from the HD to SSD.

Thanks for the reply. I am pulling my hair out on this.

I have not tried a clean install. do I need to go back to win 8.1 first and then upgrade?

I find it odd that i got the issue of the spinning dots and then the re-image the same thing. I am wondering if something else is going on. If acronis failed, I would assume the might be some other type of issue. Also, I tried using the reset with keeping my files but had the same results.

FYI, I did use acronis with win 8.1 when I go the new SSD to go from the HD to SSD.
If 10 was already activated- no. You will be aske 3 times to give the key code, just: 1. skip 2.skip. 3. Do this later, then when windows is finished installing and you have an internet connection it will reactivate automatically, you'll see this in settings>update and security>activation.

If there boot manager was corrupt and it was not a Full disk image & just the os partition that might explain the problem,

thanks. I did do a full disk image with all partitions. I guess I will try a clean install. I need to find where to download.

How to Create a Bootable USB Flash Drive to Install Windows 10

How to Clean Install Windows 10
Here is a couple of tutorials from @Brink to help out, they have links in them for further information and tools.

thanks, I just tried another reset this time not to save any of my files and the same thing is happening. Very Frustrating.

I don't use reset or system restore, just Macrium. Which incidentally also has the option to create not only the recovery USB, but also a recovery boot menu option, and on my 840 Pro recovery takes only about 7 minute then(SATA 3 SSD being much faster than a USB 3.0.

Spinning Dots at Boot Up