LauRoman

figured it out The hp s600 ssd they bought seem to have compatibility issues with the asus x55c laptop. As the ssd boots fine on another pc or laptop and another ssd boots fine in the laptop. And after installing windows in mbr mode on that ssd, it can't properly shut down or restart it. After a few minutes it shows a Driver Power State Failure stop code bsod and the power indicator and wifi led stay on until a force reboot. If installed in mbr mode the laptop will not boot to bios, but it will show a familiar "reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device and press a key" message that is fixed by a ctrl alt del and boots to windows eff that effin hp ssd and the boat it came in on, or that cheap crappy laptop. As this is the only combination it does not work in. The ssd works fine in other systems (i have) and other drives (i have) work fine on the laptop I haven't seen weirdness like this since i had some old boards unable to boot from sata if any ide drive was connected, regardless of boot order, or memory incompatibility during the ddr 3 era

Nope, the machine seems to cold boot mbr discs just fine. It can't seem to cold boot gpt discs which is weird because the original hdd was gpt partitioned because it showed as such in the cloning software. And the ssd was never formatted before being cloned to. Bios does not detect any gpt partitioned drive on cold boot but does after a restart and "launch efi shell from filesystem device" gives a not found waring regardless of cold booting or not. Bios has no set to uefi or csm mode only, no way to disable fast bootbot or secure boot or any kind of way to see if they are on or not. I think i will just break down and get one of those cheap grey market windows licenses, install it on the ssd after it is mbr formatted and deal with any aftermath from the in-law if it arises. I just hate not being able to at least find out what is going on.

Furher developments. I have installed ubuntu on a gpt partitioned ssd and hdd the same issue appears to arise.

I would do that normally anyway with systems i have setup, but the person who the laptop belongs to has no ideea what their windows and other programs' licenses are as their daughter installed it for them, nor the windows password, as they use a pin to login.

i have moved systems to ssd for a while now, but this behaviour has stomped me. An in-law asked me to move his system from a hdd to a ssd. It is an asus x55c-so202d according to the sticker. I have not booted the system beforehand to see it's behaviour. Just cloned the drive to a ssd and booted that. I booted it with the battery removed and assumed any weirdness maybe because of that or some janky bios. As soon as i saw it booted, i formatted the old hdd and moved it to the opical bay with a caddy so i really can't test if the hdd behaved the same with it. After pressing "save and exit" (F10 for this laptop) it boots to windows. Restarting the machine from windows, it boots to windows just fine. Only cold booting seems to be weird. I have replaced the bios battery thinking weirdness there. Also put back the optical drive to see if that was weirding the bios out. Same thing. In-law says it did not behave this way when it had windows on the hdd, but i did see traces of repairs on the laptop (nothing serious, just broken and glued plastic nut holder thingys) i have swapped the ssd with another one that has ubuntu on it and that cold boots just fine. So i am thnking it may be weirdness with the ssd he bough (an hp s600 240gb) or some weidnes with the boot partition, as the hdd, and subsequently the hp ssd are gpt formatted and the ubuntu ssd is mbr formatted. Any ideas on what i should check for?

Ubuntu is probably best for beginners, because if you have a problem, somebody had it before and has probably thought of a solution. It has both a Mate and a Cinnamon ISO that are a good place to start for people coming from windows

Do not know if this was the case here, but, if you are going to use any kind of internal power cable extension, have a magnet handy nearby. If the cable part of the extension is attracted to the magnet when you touch them together, throw that cable the F away

Generally no, but for older slower ram, ideally you try and find the same specced (speed and latency) RAM or better. Also, speaking of older RAM, of it is DDR3, you might have to take into account a couple of other considerations, voltage (1.5 vs 1.35) and for older or odder platforms single vs dual rank.

Yes, two of the four are identical generic hynix based sticks, and the machine seems fine with no issues with either one of them in each dimm slot, but as soon as i add the second, memtest fails six seconds in, no matter which slots they are in, and some windows programs eventually crash. I do have some other ram, one 2 gb stick, and four identical 4 gb sticks and a compatible motherboard (but that motherboard and those four sticks are tied up in a home server i can't really afford to have too much downtime on). When i get home, all the downtime i can really afford is to swap the entire RAM set with the mixed one and test that. If it fails with all of the other RAM it would be weird to call the new RAM broken since the home server it runs on is up 24/7 and has had no issues, because i do remote into it at least once a day.

Again, read the whole post. This started recently, machine has not had this issue for about two years. If i ignore the fact that it had no issues for that long, then you are right. Otherwise, please take all of the symptoms into account.

Ok, but how come if i test each stick of ram one at a time, no issues arise? Please read all of my post before jumping to conclusons.

If you have eye issues, maybe a monitor that can go brighter is better. What i fear with tvs is fonts not always looking the best or halo effects when viewing something bright in a darker background. Also it is still an LCD just LED backlit, not using OLEDs

I am troubleshooting my nephew's PC. It has random browser crashes or microsoft defender crashes. Probably other crashes too, but that is what i could observe so far. It did not used to do this, only starte about a week ago, as far as i gather. It is a p8h77-m motherboard with a sandy bridge xeon e3-1230, with an assortment of unbuffered ddr3 memory. I understand that memtest86 may not be a reliable indicator of faulty memory, i just used it as a confirmation that there IS something affecting memory. What i did so far is reset the bios and used each memory in each dimm slot (16 tests right there). As soon as a second ram stick is added, memtest crashes 6 seconds in, it does not matter which slots they are positioned in, dual or single channel mode. I swapped the cpu for a celeron i keep for troubleshooting and the exact same issues, runs fine with a single stick, but memtest freezes and some programs eventually crash in windows. Memory sticks are not the same, and while i can't 100% rule out incompatibilities, it would be weird them showing up so late, because i tested the machine almost continuously for 4 days when i assembled it from what i had lieing around a few years back, and it had no memory issues. Since i don't have another compatible motherboard i really can't exclude that both cpus have the exact same fault, but the odds of that are very low. So, my immediate conclusion is that the mothetboard is the issue. Is there anything i missed or i should test for?

You should be fine. Unless you want to boot an OS from that drive and also use its full capacity. If that is the case you may need to change your bios boot mode to disable csm. I hope you are talking about an internal drive, because if it is an external one you have to do almost nothing.

Not 100% sure, but i think it may have been related to the memory controller on the cpu, because of the limited tests i did then, it never crashed during short-ish cpu intensive tasks, only with a high number of browser tabs or a surveilance software i was using at the time that was memoey intensive. I ended up swapping it with a socket and motherboard compatible xeon-w and it has not crashed since, but the cpu did crash when used in the system the xeon came from. Your problem may be similar to mine but it also may not. Before jumping to conclusions, i would advise removing any other pci devices from your machine other than the gpu since that ryzen has no igpu. That does include m.2 or u.2 drives and things like mini pcie or m.2 wifi cards not just regular pci devices and test the system with each ram stick in each dimm slot. Might also want to turn off any auto OC setting like DOCP or any kind of cpu boost. Because i more recently had crashes in a skylake system and after a lot of trial and error, it was because of a cheap pci-usb3 controller, even though a lot of the symptimps were similar to the faulty i5.