Ok.. time to pick a few brains here. I replaced the CPU cooling fan today. After setting everything back up.. turned the machine on... no boot. It opens to the BIOS, it sees all the drives, and settings are exactly the way I had them set up. No matter the boot order, HD or Optical, the system will go past the flash screen, where the options for entering the BIOS, or boot priority screen options are... then goes to the blinking cursor. That's all it does. I have tried: Removing all but the boot drive. Changed SATA cables. Changed SATA ports for the single boot drive. Reset the BIOS. Cleared the BIOS and reset all options. Tried forcing the boot order within the BIOS. Boot order screen F11, goes straight to attempting to boot, no menu. Just stops at the blinking cursor, as if it no longer recognizes any drive outside of the BIOS menu. Any thoughts?
Try starting a windows 10 bootable USB drive and see if it starts the setup and if hard drives are actually present in there.
Are your drives set to ACHI, RAID, or whatever it was originally when you installed? Changing this post-install, perhaps by clearing BIOS, accidentally pressing a CMOS clear switch on the mobo, can cause non-boot. Is the fan drawing too much current? (only an issue really on older systems) Tried booting with the fan not connected? Or the old one back in it's place? Might be a faulty fan sending garbage into the mobo.
I managed to get the system to finally boot from the optical drive... so I thought maybe I just didn't seat all the connections snug. I did notice, that in the BIOS.. the CPU core temp wasn't showing either... or the clock speed. I clicked on the OC tab, and seen that the fan speed wasn't showing, and the OC clock was maxed out. I took her apart entirely again. Once I was sure everything was seated, turned it back on.. into the BIOS again, this time everything was the way it should be. Core temp and clock was there.. booted up, and she's once again happy. Ran an encode test to see how much temps I was saving.. under full load, the new fan kept it cool around 103F max... whereas the older one, was near 160F easily. Thanks for the help!! Always appreciate the time you guys take to answer.
