My Windows 10 computer has done this twice in the past few weeks. I get up in the morning to an ominous, “Non system disc - remove and press any key” message. But I don’t even have any way to insert a non system disc unless the USB ports count. The first time I just pressed return a few times and it went into a full BIOS reboot. This morning I just shut the computer off and it fired up just fine. Is my hard drive doomed?
You do not know yet. Check that the BIOS is indeed set up to boot from that hard disc. Also, try to boot from a USB disc and then see if the files and OS on your hard drive are still there…
Yeah, looks like your system drive is flaky. If you haven’t backed up your data, do it NOW.
Step 1: Backup all important data. Do this before doing any testing, because if the drive is flaky running tests might push it over the edge.
Step 2: Download a hard drive diagnostic utility such as HDDScan https://hddscan.com/ or Seagate Seatools SeaTools | Seagate US. I haven’t used either of them. Used to use Western Digital’s WDDiag, but it appears to be long gone at this point.
Also … if your system disk is not SSD, upgrade to SSD !
What do you have plugged into your USB ports? I have an external hard drive that causes a similar message if I reboot when it’s plugged in.
The only thing in the USB ports is a charging cord I leave there.
Have you looked at the Event Log to see if there are any errors there?
And where do I find the Event Log?
Go to the Control Panel, then select Administrative Tools. One of the tools is Event Viewer. Open that. Choose Windows Logs, then look at the System Log. Look at the log around the time that the error happened. More serious errors are labeled “Error” with a red exclamation point.
Is it an old school one with platters or an SSD?
How old is it?
I think the computer is about 6 years old. It is listed as a Hard Drive, that’s all. I looked in the event log and there are lots of warnings with a yellow triangle. Most are “distributedCOM”. A couple of errors with a red exclamation point. TPM-WMI and DNS Client events. The last bunch of yellow warnings are from last night when I did a Windows update.
Have you run CHKDSK ?
I had HDD problems a couple of years ago, CHKDSK reported several errors…
I did a disk image immediately and restored to a SSD. No problems since.