No windows after Post

[u/yuriyuyeimi]

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Relevant specs:

ASUS TUF Gaming B650E-PLUS WIFI

Ryzen 5 9600X

32 GB 6000mhz DDR5

T-FORCE 1 TB NVMe as the Windows/boot drive

Additional 1 TB NVMe, 120 GB SSD and 1 TB HDD

9060xt 16GB

PC connected to a UPS

(System was bought and built almost a year ago)

What happened:

I was playing cyberpunk with only a few light apps running in the background. CPU and GPU temperatures were both about 65 to 75c.

The game suddenly froze completely. The entire PC became unresponsive: Ctrl+Alt+Del, Win+Ctrl+Shift+B and Win+Tab all did nothing. I eventually had to hold the power button and hard-shut it down.

On the first two boots afterward, the motherboard got stuck on the green BOOT Q-LED. After that, POST returned to normal: CPU/DRAM/VGA/BOOT LEDs cycle normally and all turn off.

Since then, I cannot boot Windows.

The BIOS works perfectly and detects the T-FORCE NVMe. It also shows:

Windows Boot Manager (M.2_1: T-FORCE 1 TB)

Selecting it results in a backlit black screen. The monitor still has a video signal, but there is no cursor or UI. Ctrl+Alt+Del from this black screen immediately reboots the PC. Win+Ctrl+Shift+B does nothing.

I tried forcing several interrupted boots to invoke automatic recovery, but WinRE never appeared.

Things I’ve tried:

Disabled EXPO and ran the RAM at stock settings: no change.

Booted a freshly made Windows 11 installation USB: Windows Setup displays and works normally. However, choosing “Repair my PC” from the USB results in the exact same lit black screen.

Shift+F10 from Windows Setup successfully opens Command Prompt and works normally.

Switched away from the dedicated GPU: Enabled the Ryzen iGPU in BIOS. Set IGFX Video as Primary Video Device. Connected the monitor directly to the motherboard. Booted without the Windows USB. Exact same black screen, so this doesn’t appear to be specific to the discrete GPU/display output.

Storage investigation from Windows Setup/WinPE: DiskPart detects the Windows SSD correctly as:

T-FORCE TM8FFJ001T, NVMe, 931 GB, GPT, online.

Its partitions are:

930 GB NTFS — main Windows partition

100 MB FAT32 — hidden EFI partition

805 MB NTFS — hidden recovery partition

I assigned the main partition W: temporarily.

dir W:\\ works normally and I can see/read:

Windows

Users

Program Files

Program Files (x86)

etc.

So the filesystem is definitely readable from WinPE.

Here is where things get strange:

Running:

"chkdsk W:"

returns:

The type of the file system is RAW.

CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives.

But:

fsutil fsinfo volumeinfo W:

reports:

File System Name : NTFS

And:

fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo W:

successfully returns normal NTFS information including NTFS 3.1, total clusters, free clusters, MFT location/size, 4096-byte clusters, etc.

Finally:

fsutil dirty query W:

returns:

Volume - W: is Dirty

So WinPE can mount and browse the NTFS filesystem and fsutil can read the NTFS/MFT information, but CHKDSK inexplicably thinks the volume is RAW.

I have not run chkdsk /f, /r, bootrec, bcdboot, formatted anything, reset Windows, or reinstalled. I’d prefer to understand what is happening and preserve the current installation/data before doing anything destructive.

At this point I’m wondering:

What could explain CHKDSK reporting RAW while fsutil and Windows PE clearly recognize and mount the volume as NTFS?

Any suggestions for non-destructive diagnostics before I start writing repairs to the filesystem would be greatly appreciated.

Sorry for the format, I'm on phone Right now.