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February 26th, 2025 15:24
Aurora R16, Nvidia driver installed, boot issues
I've owned the PC from new, purchased over a year ago. This is my work computer. A few months ago, there were major issues, and after a 16 day wait a technician came to the office and replaced the i9 processor. This fixed that, but then two days ago, three days after the warranty ended, another major problem. After installing a routine Nvidia driver update, after the customary blinking, the screen turned into a soup of swirling pixels with nowhere to click. Restarted the computer with the power button, and all seemed okay. However, at the end of the work day, the screen power off button did nothing. After trying several times, again re-started the PC. This time, the PC came on with just the small blue circle, which moves with the mouse.
Contacted Dell support, paid for direct talk with a technician, when through all the steps (can access the F12-key boot options including recovery), but nothing has changed (and was refunded). There were no suggestions as to next steps.
And so now we have a PC that doesn't work, and no clear idea of what to do. That a premium PC would have two major issues within a year (two other less capable non-Dell PC's here that are over 5 years old and still run without a problem - but we need one with a minimum 4080 GPU and the others are not compatible), the last just out of warranty, is extremely disappointing. We wrote off the previous 16 days of downtime to "it happens", but now are facing yet more days of non-revenue earning downtime. Really not happy.
ejn63
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February 26th, 2025 16:00
Assuming the hardware diagnostics were run and all the hardware passed (F2 at powerup to initiate), the next step would be a clean install of Windows -- was that tried?
mikefrca
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February 26th, 2025 16:40
@ejn63 Not yet - scheduled for today, if no other options turn up. It's also taking a while to download save-able data (as the transfer seems to stop at approx. 4GB per time), and that needs to be completed before that step. Our auto backup works well, but has a lag, so we're trying to be thorough.
mikefrca
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February 27th, 2025 21:06
@ejn63 Re-installed the OS, Recovery did its checks, and now it's a BSOD on every startup. "Inaccessible Boot Device".
Does this mean that hardware is broken?
18 days of downtime now on a device that is 1 year and 1 week old.
ejn63
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February 27th, 2025 21:18
If the system is out of warranty, the next step is probably a replacement boot drive. I do not see an R18 though - is this an R16?
mikefrca
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February 27th, 2025 21:21
@ejn63 Yes, sorry, an Aurora R16 Desktop PC.
What is involved with replacing a boot drive here?
(edited)
mikefrca
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February 27th, 2025 22:15
@ejn63 Under "Repair", boot files listed as OK.
F12 on startup goes to appropriate menus, but if select "Windows Boot Manager" the PC just goes to regular startup (and BSOD).
"Boot Option Priorities" lists Windows Boot Manager as #1
General system overview lists "First HDD" as "None". Is this normal?
ejn63
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February 28th, 2025 20:46
Yes, that's normal. Replacing the boot drive means physically replacing the M.2 drive with a new one, and then loading Windows (or the Dell recovery image).
mikefrca
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February 28th, 2025 21:55
@ejn63 Thank you, much appreciated. There are two M.2 slots, one marked 2230 and one marked 2280. 2230 is the slot presently occupied. If this SSD is removed and a new 2280 placed in the 2280 slot, will this be simply a storage upgrade and not stress the system?
Will this also require purchasing a thermal pad?
mikefrca
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March 1st, 2025 18:16
Purchased new M.2 SSD (WD_Black SN850X NVMe 2tb). Correctly installed. Isn't recognized by system. Doesn't show in BIOS or BIOS setup, so can't select. Can't initialize. And now DELL OS Recovery isn't on the menu, either, in spite of being on thumb drive in USB slot, and so can't run that.
Starting PC without F12 just leads to page stating boot device error.
This Dell experience is just the worse.
mikefrca
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March 3rd, 2025 15:58
@ejn63 Have finally got the PC up and running.
Learned via an old thread that OS Recovery does not install Windows (which doesn't appear to be mentioned anywhere in the OS Recovery process). And so, installed Win11 onto the new M.2 SSD first via thumb drive, and then the keyboard F12 OS Recovery process worked.