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I have experienced a power outage yesterday and my computer now has issues booting up. Specifically, my motherboard would keep looping through the status codes up to code 32 "CPU PEI Initialization". This has happened before when I updated the bios and what I did to fix it was the following.

  1. Disconnect power supply and remove CMOS battery.
  2. Wait 5min.
  3. Flick the switch on the motherboard to a different bios chip (I have a Gigabyte motherboard with 2 bios chips)
  4. Reinsert battery and plug in to the power supply again.
  5. Turn on the computer
  6. Load bios defaults

After I loaded bios defaults, I had gotten the same error as I have now, "Inaccessible_boot_device". I was lucky that there was a system restore point back then, so all I did was restore it and it was working again. Unfortunately, as luck would have it, system restore currently tells me that it has no system restore points.

I tried everything from rebuilding BCD, using SFC /scannow, and DISM, but it was all to no avail. There is some information online telling me to mess with to mess with the SATA mode in bios. I tried changing it to the different modes, but eventually I just left it on what it was on when it was working (AHCI). I looked up information on Inaccessible_boot_device and this page tells me that there might be some useful information stored in the first parameter of the stop code. Unfortunately however, Windows 8+ BSODs no longer have these hexadecimal numbers. I became interested in trying to get the dump files, but there are none that are generated. Even enabling boot logging in advanced options produces no ntbtlog.txt.

I know I will probably have to end up reinstalling Windows, but I would really prefer if there was a solution that does not entail this since I would have to set up a lot of programs again.

I am hoping that there is some way to manually redo what system restore once did to fix this problem.

Mike B
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  • unfortunately, its very hard to tell a slightly damaged motherboard, CPU, or RAM chip (from a surge event which are common in the seconds before outage, or after resumption), from OS damage caused by an abrupt stop, without attempting reinstall. if you feel confident that the bios is now correctly configured without result, its the next logical step after checking SMART stats, running chkdsk, and memtestx86. – Frank Thomas Jun 05 '20 at 04:49
  • I do believe that it is some sort of OS damage since system recovery managed to get me out of a similar situation 2-3 months before and booting a linux live cd is successful since all the hardware is recognized and I can browse my Windows files. I have strong suspicions that some value in the registry is messed up, but Microsoft removed automatic registry backups in a recent update, so there is no way to back :/ – Mike B Jun 05 '20 at 07:01
  • @MikeB - They didn’t remove the feature it’s just disable by default. However, if you had system corruption a few months ago, your looking a drive failure more than likely. It’s extremely unlikely a healthy drive would have system corruption – Ramhound Jun 05 '20 at 09:02
  • The SMART status says that all drives are ok and chkdsk only produced an error that free space was marked as allocated. The only other time I had this problem was when I upgraded the BIOS which caused it to be reset. All the videos I watch fixing this problem have a solution where they copy files from RegBack to make it work again. It would be nice to know which registry entries might cause Inaccessible_boot_device. – Mike B Jun 05 '20 at 14:55
  • When Inaccessible_boot_device occurs after a BIOS/UEFI Firmware reset, it's almost always due to an incorrect disk type set within the BIOS/UEFI firmware settings (e.g. IDE, AHCI, RAID, etc.) – JW0914 Sep 08 '23 at 11:41

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