New hardware installed, but PC is intermittently crashing and hanging on loading Windows after a crash.

[RockandGrohl]

Previous thread on Reddit has all PC info and steps taken, summary below

https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/cuzc24/pc_new_hardware_installed_but_pc_is/

Ryzen 3600 Stock 
Antec AIO Cooler 
Asus Prime X370 Pro Motherboard (now on latest BIOS 5204)
16GB HyperX Predator 3200MHz RAM 
MSI RTX 2070 Super
Corsair VX550W PSU 
2x SSD (one is boot) and 2x HDD 
Windows 10 Home 

 

• Fresh fresh install of Windows on the SSD, it was the only drive connected so now has the complete boot record etc.
• All parts bolded above are new.
• Avast Antivirus Installed, along with Steam, Spotify and a few games, so relatively fresh OS.
• No weird regedits or strange Windows plugins or anything like that installed. Just all stock and simple.
• Temperatures are approx 40c idle and 61c load.
• I have Verbose boot on, but don't get any text in the initial Windows load (black screen blue logo) only on blue screen white text, which doesn't help as it's freezing before that stage.
• Have Prime95'd it for 15 minutes with absolutely no problems.

The problem

Following on from the last thread, we thought it was job done and I stopped doing remote support for friend. He played DOOM for 2+ hours, no problem. Installed a few games, downloaded and played Forza, realised graphics settings were low, so cranked them up. Then got like 10FPS (which shouldn't happen ever with a 2070S) and went back to menu to turn settings down, as soon as he did, the PC locked up, when he hard-reset it, it wouldn't boot.

PC performance will intermittently degrade or crash. We notice this happens in Doom when switching from gameplay to interacting with the environment, or when swapping game video settings (switching to Vulkan in DOOM, swapping graphics settings in Forza) 

After it crashes, PC will either very slowly boot or just hang forever on the Windows logo with spinning dots. Sometimes black screen. Sometimes it will take >5 minutes to boot. 

We are getting intermittent registration of one of the Hard Disk Drives. This should be totally unrelated to booting as it just has a steam directory with a couple games on it. 

Just now a pop up has come up saying "Select to show what happens with removable devices - Data E:" 
That's a hard drive, not a removable device, so it's still flicking on and off. (Important note, games are on G drive, and E drive is being intermittent)

Tonight I played Mordhau for 2 hours, with the game loading from the intermittent hard drive and didn't encounter one single problem. Framerate was locked to my 75Hz monitor and PC didn't bat an eye at gaming for 2 hours. 

I then curiously decided to restart the PC while it had just come out of gaming and it stuck on the BIOS splash screen for about a minute, then let me in the BIOS after I got impatient and hit Delete (it let me in 20 seconds after hitting delete) and then I chose to boot from the SSD, it started to load Windows which took a further few minutes. Once in I did a Windows update and had to restart, which it appeared to do just fine. I then tested a couple cold boots and it was ok. 

The problem is that unfortunately it will appear just fine, again, for a while, then the problem will reoccur. It's strange that a game crashing can be force closed, and then once back in Windows it appears to be fully functional until you shut down / restart, at which point you enter an excruciatingly long booting process.

Any help is really appreciated, thanks!

 

 

Have tried more stuff:  

 

BIOS update to 5204,

Manually adding drivers for HDD's and SSD's

Putting RTX 2070 in the middle PCI-E slot

 

Nothing so far :(

[F___M]

disconnect e: see if the problem persists

[RockandGrohl]

25 minutes ago, F___M said:

disconnect e: see if the problem persists

Done, so far re-downloading Mordhau and I've been able to successfully reproduce it before by playing a game then restarting, so going to see if that happens again, will update you all. I also disconnected the other HDD so I'm on 2x SSD.

[RockandGrohl]

43 minutes ago, F___M said:

disconnect e: see if the problem persists

I've now unplugged both HDD's and left just the SSD's in and it got to Windows startup recovery, said recovery failed and pasted results to a .txt file, what's interesting is that it's claiming the text file is in "E:\Windows\System32 etc" 

But...

Windows is ONLY on the C drive, confirmed, E and G were formatted, then had the volume erased and a new simple volume created, then formatted again and then we started putting games etc on the hard drives.

So why does Windows think there's a Windows directory in C??

To assuage any doubts, I only have C and D plugged in so Windows can't possibly be on E, as I'm typing this on the affected PC right now, loaded from the C drive...

 

EDIT: Can I see if my drive has an MBR on it? I think one may be left over, faulty, from years ago. Thing is, this would be Win 7 days.. Certainly before the Intel 60GB SSD came out..

[F___M]

diskpart will show all partitions on all connected drives.

[RockandGrohl]

Cheers, so I ran with just the SSD's in for a couple hours last night and had 0 issues, so I think I've isolated the culprit, but will test a few more hours tonight.

 

And after I've confirmed the issue is gone I plug the drives back in and try and reproduce the issue, then after that I will try and remove the MBR partition from E.

 

After running diskpart in Command Prompt what commands am I looking for to delete the partition on E? Thanks.

[F___M]

the commands are>

 

admin command prompt

 

diskpart

 

 

list disk

 

it shows you the disks connected to the computer

 

sel  disk <the number of the E:>

 

it will say the disk (#) is now selected

 

clean

 

it will say the disk has been cleaned successfully.

 

done.

 

(no danger, it will not allow you to change the system drive.)

 

[RockandGrohl]

2 hours ago, F___M said:

the commands are>

 

admin command prompt

 

diskpart

 

 

list disk

 

it shows you the disks connected to the computer

 

sel  disk <the number of the E:>

 

it will say the disk (#) is now selected

 

clean

 

it will say the disk has been cleaned successfully.

 

done.

 

(no danger, it will not allow you to change the system drive.)

This might have to be done within recovery, as I simply cannot get into Windows with the HDD's connected. Fucking things. 

 

You're sure this will terminate all MBR's and BCD's and whatever elses on the drives?

[F___M]

yes, the drive will be clean.

 

[RockandGrohl]

Got some updates.

 

Did DiskPart and it looked like something was on that E drive that shouldn't be.

 

AFTER the Clean command I took the following pics, and from there I was able to boot straight back in to Windows.

 

I'm currently setting up both new drives as GPT and doing a proper format on both of them.

 

Just wondering if the images are normal? It's still showing there's some kind of Boot Loader on Partition E which worries me.

[RockandGrohl]

Unfortunately clean did not fix the issue, and I failed to boot again after gaming (Initially it booted fine)  

 

So I have disconnected that HDD and the PC is now working fine.  

 

The HDD was working perfectly up until we swapped the mobo & CPU.

[RockandGrohl]

Have decided to scrap off the non-working HDD and since then there's been no issues. Case closed, I guess.

[F___M]

Thank you for the updates!