Windows 10 safe mode only?

July 10, 2016 10:05 PM

Lenovo yoga 2pro will only boot into safe mode

I have a Lenovo Yoga 2 pro with SSD that I just dropped. When I picked it up it seemed to work fine, but then I flipped the screen closed and open, ans the screen went black. I hard reset the computer and it wouldn't boot past the Lenovo splash screen.

I was able to get it to boot into safe mode totally fine and everything seems to be working, but even despite disabling almost everything in msconfig, it still won't proceed. I can't even really do a clean install because of Bitlocker being present.

Is there any easy way of telling what part of Windows startup is the culprit here?

posted by thewumpusisdead to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)

If this started immediately after dropping the computer, it's almost certainly a hardware issue.

(My guess is that the boot fails when the OS tries to communicate with a failed device. Safe mode doesn't load the driver for the device, which is usually to troubleshoot the driver, but in this case it means the device isn't contacted and the machine can boot.)

You have a backup, right? If not, can you backup the contents of the drive while in safe mode? You may or may not have USB drivers. If you can, I'd do this before anything else.

Bitlocker shouldn't prevent you from booting from a (Linux) live CD if you want to drill down into which device is the culprit.

It also shouldn't prevent you from wiping the device and clean-installing an OS if you think it's software. (But I wouldn't be hopeful--my money's on hardware problem.)

Another option is to boot into the BIOS (small button next to the power button) and start disabling things.
posted by lozierj at 2:28 AM on July 11, 2016