Posts by wearymason4

If the date in your BIOS is acting wonky, you might be looking at a dead CMOS battery that needs swapping out.

I never said I didn't run into some that stayed stuck on "write protected" no matter what I tried. There were just fewer of them, even though a few were practically brand new—like, maybe only a week or two of use before they quit on me. 😢

I’ve managed to "resurrect" about 20 memory sticks so far.
Some were easy fixes—just wiped the partition and started fresh—but others were total disasters because of bad connections or broken pins.

With FAT, you've got more than just filenames and extensions; the attributes and the start/end addresses for every fragment are actually written twice on the disk as a backup. So, if you wipe those specific blocks containing that data, there's nothing left on the drive to actually read.

Back in the day, you could usually clean up that kind of mess in the FAT table just by running a standard "chkdsk."

If that were actually the case, the computer wouldn't even be able to read the drive or show you a file list at all.

You just need to grab Rufus from the NET, fire it up, pick your drive (that USB stick), give it a name, set the format to NTFS, and run a quick fast FORMAT.
At least, that’s how I managed to bring my own thumb drive back from the dead recently.

Ran a week ago, I ran into the exact same thing..
I grabbed the Rufus tool and reformatted it from FAT32 over to NTFS, tweaked the drive label at the same time, and boom—it worked perfectly.
Trying to do it through Windows disk management was a total bust because it kept saying the drive was write-protected.

Most of the time, those USB ports just snap right off the motherboard, and you usually end up with some of the four pins getting crushed or cracked too. You'll need to take it to a repair shop to see if they can just re-solder the connection, or if the whole port needs a total replacement—though sometimes a tech can scavenge a working one from an old junked motherboard.

...heavy interference from nearby 2.4GHz gear is totally killing my mouse signal. It’s basically some WiFi setup sitting right next to the Bluetooth/WiFi dongle plugged into my desktop's USB port.
Even the WiFi from a smartphone can mess things up if it's sitting too close.

...my first thought is that you should probably just run a scan with some antivirus software, even if it’s just using Malware.

Maybe try messing with the boot settings in your BIOS, or you could probably just hit F8... honestly, your best bet is to just dig through the laptop's manual.

wiredotter14 said:Just grab some thicker screws and drive them in directly without using any spacers. If a couple of them just keep spinning, leave it alone—just don't go doing any backflips with your computer.

...man, you actually got a laugh out of me 🤣
About ten years back, I had these two high school kids from an electronics track drop off a custom PC build with a brand-new motherboard. They basically handed it to me as a "fix this" job because nothing worked after they put it together... then they hand me the manual and a little bag of screws that included all those brass standoffs 🤦
.....

You can never have too much common sense...

Cheers

...it wasn't an issue with the Master Boot Record because even the old USB drive was showing up right up until I hit the part where I had to pick a drive—which didn't even show up.
If it were a Master Boot Record problem, I wouldn't have even been able to see or boot from that old install USB in the first place.
The culprit was actually driver support within the latest ISO Windows 10 for newer chipsets (meaning both the disk controller and those newer drives weren't being recognized).
Anyway, now that the installation is finished, that SSD is definitely set up on GPT.

That’s exactly why I said you gotta read the first post, plain and simple... there isn't a single drive showing up in the BIOS besides the USB.
It might work for an install Windows 10 situation, but only if you're using an older .iso. I ran into this exact same headache with a version from about two years ago, but when I grabbed the latest build—the one that actually includes support and drivers for these newer chipsets—everything worked just fine.

It’s like nobody even bothered to read the original post. Neither the BIOS nor the USB installation media shows any active drive at all—just the USB stick itself.
It doesn't matter if there's a partition or if it's formatted; the drive has to show up somewhere, unless the installation files on that USB are as ancient as Windows 7 or something.
If it was running MS-DOS, you should at least see a C: drive pop up right after booting.

Pop the little panel open and take a look to see if the SSD is actually in there, then double-check that the Cable is plugged in tight.

Look, there are over 350,000 new viruses and malware strains popping up every single day. When you run the tests on the top 10 antivirus programs, they all hit above a 99% detection rate. So, saying Microsoft Defender is sitting at 80%? Honestly, that claim is just ridiculous.
At the end of the day, the biggest layer of defense is actually just the user. It’s about how careful you are when you're downloading files or if you're smart enough to stay away from sketchy websites.

Microsoft Defender is always sitting pretty in those top 10 antivirus rankings, and honestly, since it came bundled with Windows 10, it’s been my go-to. It’s free, and I haven't run into a single issue with detection or anything weird since day one.
I don't really clutter my system with much else—just keep Malwarebytes free running in the background. I don't even bother with the trial activation; I just run a quick scan, update the definitions every now and then, and then shut it down until I need it again.

https://www.av-test.org/en/antivirus/home-windows/

.. or maybe you just plugged the CPU fan into some random header meant for a case fan instead of the dedicated one

... you sure there isn't some extra capacitor tucked away under the motherboard in a weird spot?
Otherwise, if the CPU voltage regulator doesn't kick in, the whole PC just shuts itself down automatically.

Hard to tell from this photo, but is that a phone cable (those multi-colored wires) or is it coaxial?
If it's phone line, you just match up the colors. If it's coax, you've got to strip the shielding at both ends and join those together too.
If we were talking fiber optics, you'd be looking at glass strands inside the jacket, and there's no way you're splicing that yourself.