anotherfatgeek

This will be longer than the sticky recommends, but I've done a bunch of troubleshooting already. First, some specs: CPU: R7 3800X Motherboard: Asus PRIME B550M-A Wi-Fi RAM: Corsair DDR4-3000 4x8GB GPU: Asus Strix 2070 Boot SSD: Samsung 960 Evo 250GB PSU: Antec EAG Pro 750 On Sunday my wi-fi suddenly disconnected while playing a game (Helldivers II). It wouldn't reconnect so I tried a reboot. It hasn't worked since. I have it on a UPS and there wasn't any crazy weather happening. I put the boot SSD into an enclosure and it was dead. I replaced it (Samsung 980 Pro 1TB). Here's where things get weird. At first I got an error "We couldn't install windows in the location you chose. 0x80300024." It seems to be the same issue as the people in this thread Now I don't get any error at all. It just spins forever. I did all the troubleshooting with diskpart in that thread but I get I/O errors. Now I'm thinking it's a bad motherboard, so I get a replacement; the Asus PRIME B550M-A Wi-Fi II. Same issue Both BIOSes were updated to latest (3404 for the old one, 3405 for the new). I booted into Linux (Ubuntu 22.04.3) and gParted sees the drive, but fails when I try to do anything on it. I re-made my Windows install USB (22H2 downloaded through the Media Creation Tool) and nothing changed. I made a new Windows USB using an older iso I had (2020H2, I think) and it's the same issue. For giggles, I threw an old SATA SSD in there and Windows setup doesn't even start properly. At this point the only hardware still in the system from when it broke are the CPU, GPU, and RAM., and PSU. And the case, I guess. One thing I've noticed is that everything is very slow. Booting into Windows setup takes a good five minutes. Every step in setup takes at least a minute of hourglass. Same in Linux. I'm old and have been doing this professionally for 20 years. If it's a bad CPU then it's the weirdest bad CPU I've ever seen. I can't think of how a GPU might cause this issue either. I took out all but one stick of RAM (and tried another) and that didn't make a difference, I pulled RAM from my Unraid box to test with as well and there was no difference. I also tried another PSU. I don’t have a spare CPU or GPU to test. Can anyone else think of anything I haven't thought of?

I don't think that's an automatic center punch. Looks like the center punch that came with his Ryobi bit set. Lower right of this pic:

Rig Name: People name computers? CPU: i5-6600k No OC GPU: Asus Strix GTX-970 Direct CU II Ram: Corsair Vengeance 16GB (8x2) DDR4 2400