Blue Screens but not the HDD?

[*Chazz]

I have a buddy of mine running the following specs:

Gtx 750ti

Asrock z75 pro3

i5-3470

8gb ram DDR3 gskill ripjaw

 

His computer has been blue screening lately seemingly regardless of the different hard drives that have been placed in his system. Replacing them did alleviated the symptoms for period of time with only the blue screens to return later. He outlines his process below:

 

Was running several years with 1tb hdd (wd black) until it began crashing suggesting the to hdd needed to be replaced(blue screens and crashes to desktop with increasing frequency)

 

Peeled a kingston 250gb ssd from a laptop to put in the desktop as a temporary solution. Worked fine (although I may remember one or two random blue screens) for several months.

 

Got a 1tb wd blue ssd and did a fresh install of windows to replace 250gb. The 1tb worked for 1 week, then blue screens, crashes to desktop, crashes while launching applications, and random chrome "aw snaps". Crashes were indiscriminate, happening on a blank desktop, or in the middle of a game. Things worsened until virtually nothing would launch.

 

Put back in previously mentioned kingston 250gb ssd in desktop without any changes to it's data, and desktop worked just fine, for 1 week, then blue screens and crashing applications.

Ran a windows RAM diagnostic -- no errors

 

TLDR; Computer has been been blue screening lately seemingly regardless of the different hard drives that have been placed in his system. Replacing them did alleviated the symptoms for period of time with only the blue screens to return later.

 

Some Questions:

Is there a chance the two SSD's could be bad, or have been damaged by his old system?

 

How can we or is there a way go about diagnosing the source of the issue without the need for equivalent hardware to swap with? The hardware is fairly old so I suspect that its likely the mother board or the maybe the RAM? 

 

Which may be more likely to go bad: the RAM or the Motherboard?

 

What do you think is likely the issue responsible for the blue screens?

 

Many thanks for the help.

[WhitetailAni]

Try different SATA cables and SATA ports.

If this doesn't fix it, you might have other dying or dead hardware.

[Bearpaddocks]

Do you have a photo of the BSOD message? Had same problem recently but with the HDD (definitely). So yours well could be the RAM. Highly unlikely to be the mobo.

[aDoomGuy]

On the machine with the problem search start menu for cmd and choose run as administrator. Then run following commands while connected to the internet.

 

sfc /scannow

If system file checker fixes any issues reboot the computer. If not proceed to the next step

 

Open cmd as before and run these.

DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /ScanHealth

DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /RestoreHealth

Make sure you get the big and small letters as they are here. Then reboot the machine. See if this helps.