Did my PC just die?

[Jarhead0331]

One of my older systems which has been a workhorse for me may have shit the bed last night. It's a 12 gen i9 with a 3080 gpu. It was running fine last night and I had to leave for an hour to pick my daughter up from dance class. When I got back, it looked fine, but something was very wrong. It was essentially frozen, although I could move the mouse around. However, keyboard wouldn't respond and so I couldn't reboot. I did a hard shut down and power up and when it recovered, I got the message:

Checking media presence...
Start PXE over IPv4...

I googled this and see it means there is either an issue with my boot drive or the boot order. I can get into Bios but everything looks normal. All my drives seem to be detected and the boot order appears to list hard disks first.

Is my C: dead? I will check the cables in the tower, but I'm not hopeful. Any suggestions? She's a good rig.

[Pete Dero]

Google suggestion :

Within the BIOS settings, find options for "Network Boot," "Boot from LAN," or "PXE Boot" and disable them in the "Boot Menu".

[Redwolf]

Is my C: dead?

Yes. Sorry, SSDs are expensive now.

PXE is not an error message, it is just trying to boot from the network.

[Jarhead0331]

Turns out it was the boot SSD that failed. I had to replace it.

[W8taminute]

Interesting.  I've got a boot SSD as well so I'll keep this error message in mind.

[Crossroads]

I had a kind of similar situation around Christmas. My 9‑year‑old Samsung EVO 870 SSD had quietly corrupted some boot sectors or something along those lines. No errors popped up at first, just certain Windows updates that kept failing and rolling back. With Copilot's help I ran some PowerShell diagnostics, which did report issues and claimed to fix them but the same update still failed. Must have been those broken sectors all along.

Then the machine stopped booting altogether. No Repair Disk managed to bring it back, and to make things worse, my latest System Image had apparently copied the corrupted files, so I couldn't restore the C‑drive from that either.

In the end I bought a new M.2 SSD and reinstalled everything from scratch. All the important data was backed up in multiple places, but of course, apps don't survive that kind of reset. That said, Copilot helped me mount the old System Image as a drive, so I managed to rescue a few files I had forgotten to back up.

All good now: fast new C‑drive, fresh system images, and backups checked and improved.

What bugs me though is for once I thought I was in the clear, I had a recent system image and all. Maybe I should take a habit to create the System image in a few locations, to have older versions available as well. Windows seems to maintain only the recent one, if same location used.