Windows 10: Odd Freezes on Startup both normal and repair mode - any suggestions?

Whats odd on this is that it comes and goes. Brief history - system is
ACER 5560 laptop which came with 7 and was successfully upgraded to 10 several years ago
had 500gb drive, but now is Seagate 1tb and 16gb ram

What happened:
I had put the system in sleep mode, and then later noticed it had come back on unexpectedly, and was at a black screen with no disk activity. I tried mouse and keyboard but no changes, then did a forced power down.
Upon restart, I got errors indicating a missing windows partition. Routine checks and attempts to do CHKDSK failed and most programs showed the partition locked.
I suspect the last major update (1803?) started up and did not finish fully. I had been postponing for lack of disk space, but had cleared enough for it just prior to this.

Started up a good rescue DVD and then a partition rescue, and found the program showing over 400 possible partition tables.. (small shriek here along with the usual words)
Did a recovery from the first and most likely 10 partitions and recovered much of the programs, and what appears to be all the data to an external drive.
Figuring its about 5 years old and a good time to replace the drive I got a Seagate 1Tb and put in, then downloaded with the media creation tool to a USB, and did a fresh install of Win10 home. All went well

But - after a longer session of copying recovered files back on the new drive, I came in to see it frozen, black screen and unresponsive. Power cycled - and it would start Windows and get one circle of the balls going round the freeze. Three attempts and then the automatic repair would start and freeze in almost the same amount of time.
Put in a DVD, then a USB and it would not see them or let me into BIOS or BOOT SELECT screens - so apparently the keyboard is off during this.. (?)
Pulled the new hard drive and then was able to run the USB or DVD. Thinking AHA! bad drive?

Put new drive back in, and it runs fine starting in normal mode with a reasonable start time. Able to shut down and start up several times with no problems.

A day goes by and again its running when it should have been asleep, and its frozen on black screen and cant boot or auto repair.
Pull the hard drive, and repeat - and its working again. Tried fix MBR fix boot etc no problems but this keeps acting up.

Leaning toward problems on mobo but cant explain why it works ok when it wants to.. its not a heat issue as I have tried it with a cold board and hot and its not going to start any further than a few seconds into the first Windows Logo till I pull the drive and re-insert.

Not being as familiar as some with UEFI I was wondering if this a legacy bios laptop was getting iffy with the windows boot loader and maybe not being detected correctly by the setup.

I looked up the ST1000 seagate in case there were some reports of such, or firmware upgrades but did not see anything and the Acer Bios is the latest available for this older system. Had it not worked well for several years with 10, I would suspect compatibility issues - or maybe this last major update changed how they boot?

I don't generally ask for help much - as I have been at this since way before PCs came out - did corporate IT and network admin for a major oil company in the early 90s, and ran a one man PC shop for around 20 years afterwards, so I have run into quite a few odd ones - but this one is a real headscratcher... so I post here in hopes one of you will have something to try I did not think of. Thanks for any help and for taking the time to read it - I would rather have too much info than not enough on such posts.

:)

 

Boot into Safe Mode on Windows 10  


I am stuck in Safe Mode in spite of following all the suggested steps to go back to Normal Startup - Like opening file location of msconfig.exe & running as Administrator. The computer I am trying to get out of safe mode has just been updated from Windows 7.

 

cannot return to normal startup in MSCONFIG after running it in diagnostic startup.

Hi Gary,

Thank you for posting your query in Microsoft Community.

I understand you are not able to boot to in normal mode. Sorry for the inconvenience this has caused.

Did you follow the below steps to enable the Normal startup?

• Press Windows + R keys from the Keyboard.
• Type msconfig and hit Enter.
• Click on the General tab.
• Select the Normal startup option.
• Click on Apply and Ok.
• Restart the system and check.

If yes, you may follow the below steps to check if the computer boots to selective startup:

• Press Windows + R keys from the Keyboard.
• Type msconfig and hit Enter.
• Select the General tab.
• Select the Selective startup option, check the box for load startup services, load startup items, use original boot configuration will be enabled.
• Restart the computer.

If it boots successfully to selective startup then you can boot to normal startup from selective startup.

Please check the above scenario and get back with the results.

Thank you.

 

Winbook TW802 freezes on startup!

Hi,

I suggest you to create a Windows 10 installation media and perform a Startup Repair on the device and check if it helps to resolve the issue.
This is an alternate way to boot the device and run recovery tools when something goes wrong with the Operating system.

Please follow the steps below to do Startup repair:

Steps:-

• • • • • 
          Insert the installation USB drive
          and boot Windows 10 from it.
          
          If you don't have one, you can Create an installation Media.
          
        • 
          In the ‘Windows setup’ page select the ‘language to install’, ‘Time and currency format’
          and the ‘keyboard or input method’ and click on ‘next’.
          
        • 
          Click on ‘Repair your computer’ and select ‘Troubleshoot’.
          
        • 
          Click on ‘Advanced options’ and select ‘Startup Repair’
          and select the operating system.
          

Do let us know if you are able to use your tablet. Thank you.