Not too long ago, my Home windows PC stubbornly determined to refuse in addition up, and so I turned to the normal troubleshooting strategy that is served me properly for a few many years: I typed a number of the signs into Google to see what got here up.
There is a wealth of recommendation on the market on the net, tens of millions of discussion board and Reddit posts asking for PC assist, and tens of millions of posts attempting to supply options to the issue. Relying on what your difficulty is, it might probably take a while to search out related data, however that is an strategy that usually will get outcomes.
Nevertheless, having tried a wide range of fixes advised by the online at massive, plus a couple of concepts of my very own, Home windows nonetheless wasn’t beginning up correctly. So, I made a decision to see if generative synthetic intelligence might assist—apart from writing poetry and discovering jobs, might it additionally inform me methods to get Home windows working once more?
We all know AI is educated on huge swathes of the open internet, together with assist boards and Reddit threads. However is it good sufficient to summarize and synthesize all of this information right into a kind that is truly useful for fixing pc issues?
The Home windows PC drawback
My Home windows PC is about up with an SSD drive for the working system and for applications, and an HDD for video games and all the things else, and it is on more often than not—so once we had an influence lower in our native space, all the things turned off immediately and with out warning. After that, the SSD with Home windows on would not boot up as regular.
On begin up, the PC shows a blue display with the message “UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME”, in order that’s our first clue there. Utilizing a Home windows 11 restoration USB drive, I will entry the Begin-up restore utility, however this merely shows the message that it “could not restore your PC.” The subsequent possibility is the command immediate, and from there I can see the recordsdata and folders on each my SSD and HDD drives—suggesting the info is there, however the drives cannot be booted up.
The Microsoft assist boards had been some assist.
Credit score: Lifehacker
Then I obtained into recommendation from the online, together with the command immediate strains “sfc /scannow” to scan for and repair errors (this informed me a repair had been made, however it did not make any distinction), and a sequence of “bootrec” instructions—”/fixmbr,” “/fixboot,” “/scanos,” and “/rebuildbcd,” which both all accomplished efficiently or informed me entry to the SSD was denied. The outdated trustworthy “chkdsk” command would not run both, and threw up a write protected message too.
At this stage it appeared the facility lower had tousled the SSD in some way and put it right into a write defend mode—one thing that appears pretty widespread. Whereas the recommendation hooked up to on-line posts that reference related points is generally simply to exchange the drive, on the subsequent boot I obtained a distinct blue display message: “The Boot Configuration Information to your PC is lacking or accommodates errors.”
There was additionally loads of helpful recommendation on Reddit.
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The blue display really useful reinstalling Home windows, in order all my information is backed up, earlier than I gave up on the SSD I attempted placing a contemporary copy of the working system in place, from an hooked up USB drive. Nevertheless, when it got here to the listing of drives I used to be in a position to set up Home windows 11 on, the SSD wasn’t included.
So I used to be most definitely a borked SSD drive—regardless that the recordsdata on it are accurately listed after I seen it by way of the command immediate interface. My final resort was the powers of generative AI, and whereas I wasn’t optimistic about my possibilities of efficiently fixing the issue at this level, I believed it was price a attempt.
Looking for an answer
For the restore job, I referred to as on ChatGPT’s o1-preview mannequin: It’s, OpenAI says, the most effective mannequin for superior reasoning, and my feeling was I wanted all of the superior reasoning I might get. In the intervening time, nevertheless, you want a ChatGPT Plus subscription to entry o1-preview, which is able to set you again $20 a month.
Having fastidiously typed out the issue in as a lot element and with as a lot context as I might, I let ChatGPT get to work. When you’re utilizing the o1-preview mannequin, the responses take longer to point out up, however they arrive with messages on display like “figuring out potential causes” and “diagnosing SSD well being.”
Assist me, ChatGPT o1-preview, you are my solely hope.
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Because it typically does for testing functions, ChatGPT first confirmed me two responses and requested me to decide on the most effective—which was a bit of tough, as I did not know if both of them had been proper. The primary strategies I hadn’t tried earlier than had been to make use of the Diskpart utility (which could not see my SSD), and to take away Bitlocker encryption (which did not work both). I additionally obtained some extra generic ideas, together with backing up information, testing the SSD in one other PC, and utilizing no matter diagnostic instruments the producer had offered.
The place AI bots actually have the benefit over a straight internet search is within the two-way nature of them: I might ask follow-up questions, float concepts about what had gone flawed, ask for clarification on any level, and tweak my prompts. More often than not, the responses made sense and had been legitimate (the “chkdsk” and “bootrec” instructions got here up once more), however ultimately even ChatGPT needed to admit defeat and acknowledge the “sturdy indicators” of {hardware} failure.
The responses, on the entire, had been detailed and made sense.
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Having already established that I used to be most likely an unfixable SSD drawback and changing the entire drive, it could have been a bit of unfair to anticipate ChatGPT to work miracles. Nevertheless, it did accurately attain the best conclusion (I believe), and even provided up some useful strategies for stopping the identical drawback occurring once more (primarily, an uninterruptible energy provide). It seems like a extra customized and useful troubleshooting possibility, so long as its output might be trusted.
In fact, it is a pattern measurement of 1: I would must run a number of sorts of PC issues by way of ChatGPT to see if it was truly helpful for pc restore. For now, it does not look as if Microsoft or Apple are assured sufficient within the tech to supply any sort of restore bot—maybe as a result of they do not need to be accountable if a foul AI concept results in important information loss. Whereas all the solutions I noticed made sense logically, nobody has but mounted the generative AI hallucination drawback.
