UE4 launch did weird stuff to my screen, computer can't repair itself.

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  1. My relic of a computer, and Substance TDR setting change.

My c drive has been very full lately, im keeping projects on d, a second internal, both are 7200 old school.
Substance Painter even warned me my amd 7800 series sucked whenever I opened it, till recently I changed the suggested tdr setting to 60 seconds
In short, my machine was getting quite old. A new one is on the way. But I’d like to keep this one running if possible, or get my resources extracted by a local non-moron who i trust.

  1. The problem.

The last two times I launched ue4 editor from the launcher, I got a weird screen distortion, then nothing…
I’d describe the screen effect as an almost matrix looking screen, only instead of numbers or letters, it was like rain drops carried the pixels down the screen for a second before all went black.
And not like a matrix fan was messing with it, that’s just how it looked. Ha!

after the first time, I was able to restart, and all seemed well till I tried to launch the ue4 editor again. Now when I restart, Windows says it can’t repair, then I get the blue screen with shut down, continue, or advanced options. If i continue, i get a black screen.

then I was dumb enough to try safe mode without knowing m’damm password.

I’m not amazing at computers. obviously. (Can I still sit with you guys? Lol.)
But does anyone have any advice? Does it sound like I could even have a pro recover my data?
Could Epic need to know this?

oh, I did find something online which I tried, blindly, much like a lemming.
It started by telling me to go to cmd prompt, then start with three commands like (recboot?), and ended with chkdsk for all my discs. I assume you guys know what it was.
It seemed to give me encouraging results. Sadly, black screen. Or is it a bottomless pit?

Can anyone help this lemming be a builder, or have I wandered off the radar?

Thanks for your time, and sorry I stole it.
-John

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So your GPU is well below the minimum requirements, the glitching you saw when you opened UE4 was because of a GPU issue.

As far as your computer having trouble starting up, your files should be fine, but you’d need to plug the hard drives into another computer so that you can access them and copy your files off. Most likely the issue is simply that Windows is corrupted and needs to be reinstalled, but you just need to copy your files off the drive that you have Windows installed on before you do that.

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thank you, DarthViper107, that’s great news. I’ll figure something out.

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Hey John, in the past when my Windows OS was corrupted I actually booted Linux off of a thumb drive, and that allowed me to access the HD contents without having to remove it. If you have a large portable HD or even a large thumb drive, you can try that. Do some googling on it and learn more about launching Linux from an external HD/thumbrive.

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Thx.

And let me apologize in advance for ue5 costing $50/ mo. Lol.