Computer locks up at random, I am so confused.

[bANONYMOUS]

Specs: i9-9900k stock clock, gigabyte aorus xtreme x390 BIOS F9j, 32GB (4x8GB) Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro, 3x ADATA XPG Gammix S11 Pro NVMe RAID0 in BIOS, 3x 8TB HDD Currently not hooked up for diagnostics right now. 1200w Corsair HX1200, EVGA FTW3 GTX 1080 ti. Currently running a clean install of Windows 10 from Microsoft that I just installed lastnight, using the same build and USB installer on my laptop right now and that's working fine, so it's not a bad install or Windows USB creation.

 

So as of right now, my desktop and laptop are the same in terms of software, clean install, only the windows update drivers installed, and the latest studio driver from Nvidia.

 

Laptop works perfect, desktop, for whatever reason, just started locking up today for no reason. What I've been doing is downloading everything from Google Photo's so I can switch over my cloud storage to be only business related, and I'm going to use OneDrive for everything personal. So all I've been doing is downloading the Google Takeout of Google Photos.

 

It compiled my entire Google Photo's into 10 ~50GB files, which I was downloading, one finished, and then the other 9 failed while I was watching an LTT video and while watching the LTT video on Youtube, it just locked up as of the GPU failed (screen stopped moving, artifacts, and sound glitching) then after a few seconds, it all went back to normal as if nothing happened but all of the downloads failed. So I tried opening file explorer to delete the interrupted downloads, and it locked up and the entire computer crashed. I tried rebooting, back into windows just fine, tried to delete those uncompleted downloads, locked up again, tried in safe mode, locked up. I finally was able to delete them one at a time, and now if I empty the recycle bin, it locks up the computer again.

 

It's now to the point that I can use my computer completely fine for how longer I want, but the second I open file explorer, it locks up. Yet I can operate everything normally if the files and programs are on my desktop. I have no idea why this is happening but I tried downgrading my BIOS to F8 and that did nothing so I flashed back to F9j and everything is still fine except my RAID array was decompiled and for some reason it's now showing I have 24 unknown PCIe storage devices so I can't even find the NVMe's to put them back into RAID0.

 

I looked into my processor, because there is the P0 and R0 9900K, mine is a P0 so it's supported on BIOS F3 (launch BIOS) and that still has the issue with PCIe devices, it also scrolls extremely slow for some reason, like it takes a solid 3-5 seconds between selection just to scroll down through the PCIe devices so this is either something wrong with the motherboard, M.2 ports, or the NVMe's, but I don't understand why this just happened over night while it was just downloading stuff from Google Photo's.

 

I can't even setup the RAID again to see if I can recover that Windows install, or at the very least just do a clean install again on the NVMe's in RAID0 because every device is labeled "PCIe Storage Dev On Port X" and the ports are 1 through 24, there is no other info on any ports or what they are so I have no idea which of these 24 are the three NVMe's, and all I can do is change them from "Not RST Controlled" to "RST Controlled"

 

There's also no info at all under NVMe Configuration that tells me which PCIe ports the NVMe's are using.

 

So as of right now, I have a computer that boots into the BIOS, I can't do anything else, my RAID is gone, I can't configure a new RAID because it now says I have 24 PCIe devices, it doesn't tell me which ones they are so I don't know which ones  to assign RST Controlled so I can configure a new RAID. and there's no info anywhere else in the BIOS to tell me which PCIe ports the NVMe's are assigned to.

 

So that's basically where I'm at right now. I also just lost everything from Google Drive as well because I already downloaded everything and it was all copying over to the HDD for archive when everything messed up on it's own lastnight while I was sleeping. So my entire Google Drive backup I downloaded is gone locally, and from Google Drive, so that's a nice touch as well lol

 

Also just some more info, I'm not running XMP for diagnostics just to take anything out of the situation that could cause issues, and I bought these NVMe's in April 2020, so they're legit one year old now so I don't think it's a failed drive. I checked the drives in CrystalDiskInfo, nothing came up as an issue, each drive shares a little over 3000 hours and with the RAID benchmarked in CrystalDiskMark they get just over 3500MB/s Read and a little over 3000MB/s Write. My HDD's have over 12,000 hours use and operate completely fine so I'm suspecting a BIOS or motherboard issue and not a failed NVMe.

[bANONYMOUS]

I figured out the NVMe RAID config again, CSM was enabled again by default when I downgraded and upgraded BIOS versions so that's resolved, now when I go to SATA And RST Configuration it only shows the PCIe storage for the actual NVMe ports being used so the three actual devices come up now and can make an NVMe RAID again, however that one menu on the BIOS is still SUPER slow, like it legit takes multiple seconds just go scroll down from one selection to the next, so something is really wrong with the BIOS and it did this in older versions as well so something is still messed up here and I'm not entirely sure what's going on.

 

However, I'm thinking that this might be the issue I was facing in Windows because of CSM was enabled after updating the BIOS when I did the clean install of Windows on the old RAID config that was already established, that should mean that CSM was causing the BIOS RAID to glitch out when I try to access the NVMe's and over time and time it eventually corrupted the RAID which also explains why it kept getting worse and worse the more times I would try to use it.

 

So I think so far, I should be able to reinstall Windows, and I just have to wait this out to see if the issue persists again after  using it for awhile, but there is still something wrong with the BIOS, this one menu is SUPER slow, it's only the RAID config menu, the rest of the BIOS is super fast, it's as soon as I open this window, it's like the integrated RAID controller on the motherboard is failing or something. Or possibly CPU/RAM failure but I can't test that fully without a confirmed working motherboard.

 

Any suggestions on any further testing I can do would be appreciated. I'm literally just figuring it all out as I go so I'm willing to give anything a shot at this point.

[bANONYMOUS]

Okay no there's more issues, now that I have the BIOS on the latest F9j, where I was before, I restored optimized defaults just to get rid of any changes so it's right out of the box default and I can adjust from there for diagnostics sake. all I've done so far from default is disable CSM, saved and rebooted into BIOS again, changed the three PCIe storage devices which was port 9, 17, and 21 for my NVMe's, all of which are PCIe 3.0 devices. They are all RST Controlled, saved, rebooted, go to Intel Rapid Storage Technology to manually set up a new RAID, and my old RAID actually comes up for some reason so I guess it does still exist, but it says failed, and for some reason, only two NVMe's are showing up as options for RAID.

 

So, now, I have all three NVMe's set to RST Controlled, they all come up and are seen normally, but in the RAID config window, it's only showing two, and one is PCIe 3.0, and the other is PCIe 2.0.. So again, I think the raid controller might be dead, this is super glitchy and nothing makes sense right now, it's all over the place with issues.

[Bombastinator]

5 minutes ago, bANONYMOUS said:

Okay no there's more issues, now that I have the BIOS on the latest F9j, where I was before, I restored optimized defaults just to get rid of any changes so it's right out of the box default and I can adjust from there for diagnostics sake. all I've done so far from default is disable CSM, saved and rebooted into BIOS again, changed the three PCIe storage devices which was port 9, 17, and 21 for my NVMe's, all of which are PCIe 3.0 devices. They are all RST Controlled, saved, rebooted, go to Intel Rapid Storage Technology to manually set up a new RAID, and my old RAID actually comes up for some reason so I guess it does still exist, but it says failed, and for some reason, only two NVMe's are showing up as options for RAID.

 

So, now, I have all three NVMe's set to RST Controlled, they all come up and are seen normally, but in the RAID config window, it's only showing two, and one is PCIe 3.0, and the other is PCIe 2.0.. So again, I think the raid controller might be dead, this is super glitchy and nothing makes sense right now, it's all over the place with issues.

RAID number what?  If it’s raid0 there isn’t a lot of reason to have it.  NVME is faster than is useful for most things all by itself I understand.

[bANONYMOUS]

3 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

RAID number what?  If it’s raid0 there isn’t a lot of reason to have it.  NVME is faster than is useful for most things all by itself I understand.

RAID0 because 1TB NVMe's were on sale when I bought them so it was cheaper to buy three 1TB NVMe's instead of a single 2TB NVMe, and it's just for ease of use so everything is on one drive, and with the reliability of NVMe's I've never had issues running RAID before. My laptop which is a Zephyrus Duo comes with two 1TB NVMe's in RAID 0 from factory.

 

The idea is to just have everything on one "drive" according to Windows so there is no confusion between which drive has what installed or what programs//files are on what, everything is on one and it's just a lot simpler to operate when it's all working, which with my laptop it has been flawless and running this setup on my desktop with Linux was also flawless but that was a software RAID0 with madam. As far as I know you can't do a software RAID with Windows that the actual OS is installed to so I have to use a hardware RAID through BIOS. It was working fine but I had this idea that I wanted to start investing in cloud storage and get rid of my mechanical hard drives all together. So I backed everything up to an external drive, wiped everything, and when I was setting it all up it was fine, but then during normal use issues started persisting so I think it was a corrupt RAID because CSM was turned back on, but the RAID0 was already configured before resetting the BIOS.

 

So RAID0 configured with CSM off, Updated BIOS to latest revision, I think I was on F9i before, and now it's F9j, reset BIOS default settings, CSM was turned back on by default, didn't notice, installed Windows on the already existing RAID array that was set up, and over time CSM being enabled made the BIOS corrupt the RAID during use every time the NVMe's were accessed.

 

That's my theory anyway but as to why one NVMe is reading as PCIe 2.0 and one NVMe is missing entirely now, I'm not too sure. I still have a hunch that the RAID controller is dead or currently dying.

[bANONYMOUS]

I decompiled the raid entirely, I turned off the RST Controller, I booted into a live USB of linux to check the NVMe's and I have the HDD unhooked so there is only three NVMe's active and nothing else.

 

I checked in Disk's in Linux and two NVMe's are showing as NTFS and the third is just unallocated space with no format which I thought was really weird, I just formatted all three drives to test them as ext4 for the entire drives and I'm going to check to see if anything is wrong with them separately because there is now nothing RAID configured in the BIOS so this should rule out any drive failure that CrystalDiskInfo didn't see on Windows.

 

One thing I noticed so far is that the one drive that was coming up in Linux as unallocated space isn't showing a partition table. The two that were showing up at NTFS are GUID, and the unallocated doesn't have a partition table.

 

I formatted all three at ext4, yet that third drive is still not showing a partition table, I'm starting to suspect this might be the SATA controller and not the RAID controller because one of the M.2 slots disables SATA 5 and 6. 

[bANONYMOUS]

I'm going to swap the NVMe's around on the motherboard and come back to report findings because I just tried formatting all three NVMe's again, make ext4 partitions, drives one and two both show ext4 guid, and they say linux partition, and drive three I was able to get formatted, made an ext4 partition, it says guid now, but it says it's a basic filesystem.

 

I'm literally doing the exact same process for all three drives, RAID is completely disabled in BIOS and I booted off of this live USB with AHCI so there is legit nothing RAID at all active in BIOS so this is entirely drive related at this point or M.2 port allocation.

 

So I tried formatting all the NVMe's again, and made NTFS partitions this time, all three work and all three are identical now, they all show the same everything.

Ran a benchmark and this is where it gets interesting.

 

Drive 1 - 3.5GB/s Read, 2.9GB/s Write

Drive 2 - 3.5GB/s Read, 2.9GB/s Write

Drive 3 - 2..8GB/s Read, 2.7GB/s Write

 

Every drive is the same format, there is nothing on any drive, RAID is completely disabled, drive three is slower than the rest, so I'm going to take my entire computer apart, swap the NVMe's around and run this benchmark again to see if the slow drive changes port, or if the same port is slow.

 

If the same port is slow, I think the motherboard just can't do NVMe RAID with three devices because that one M.2 port shares bandwidth with the SATA controller which is why SATA ports 5 and 6 get disabled if you run a drive in that one port.

 

The part that doesn't make sense right now is why did this work for the last 6 months on Windows and now on the latest BIOS suddenly it doesn't work at all. Like was BIOS F9i just bad and didn't detect this issue? Or is this an issue with F9j? Cause even restoring back to F9i, or even F8, even tried the launch F3 BIOS because my 9900k is a P0 first release compatible with F3 where as the R0 revisions of the 9900k need BIOS F5 to run. and it's the same issue every single time which was leading me to believe this is a hardware issue and not BIOS related. But now I have no idea at all.

 

Could be one failing drive that just didn't show up in CrystalDiskInfo, which is crazy considering these are only a year old and only have about 3000 hours of use on them so that's not a good look for Adata if that's the case, but also, it's only ONE drive and there's only ONE M.2 port that shares bandwidth with SATA and for some reason only ONE NVMe is showing as PCIe 2.0 in BIOS where as the other two are PCIe 3.0 like they should be.

 

So it could be a bad drive, bad SATA controller, or from so many different BIOS flashes that now corrupted the EEPROM so now the BIOS flashes all have the existing issue that doesn't get overwritten when I flash a new BIOS (highly unlikely but a possibility).

OR for some reason this motherboard just doesn't run that last M.2 port at 3.0 PCIe speed because it shares bandwidth with the SATA controller, and it's just been working on it's own for some magical reason this entire time and it was never suppose to work and now that I updated everything and restored all defaults that the glitch that was causing it magically work is now corrected and this issue should have just been there from the start.. Not entirely sure yet but this is becoming quite the rabbit hole

[Bombastinator]

Iirc Nvme doesn’t hardware raid at all and software  raid is problematic.  This may just not work.  This is the sort of thing that may change though.

Edited April 9, 2021 by Bombastinator

[bANONYMOUS]

It's been working like this for just over a year now, all I did was wiped my computer to reinstall a fresh copy of Windows for a youtube video to demonstrate how to do something, and I updated to the latest BIOS before doing the clean install of Windows. I tried going back to the old BIOS but the problem seems to be there to stay.

 

Also, after swapping NVMe's around, drive 3 is always the slow one no matter what I put in there, and just like I suspected. Drive 3, is M2M, that's the top M.2 slot that shares bandwidth with the SATA controller.

 

So I don't know what the issue is, but Port M2M is slower than the other two, and I think that's what causing my issue with this RAID array and why it corrupted.

I just set up a RAID0 with M2A and M2P and so far everything is working perfect, so I think this motherboard just sucks at RAID and for some reason it has three M.2 PCIe ports, but if you use them all you can't use RAID. It's one or the other and I think it only worked before because it was probably an older BIOS where it was setup before this issue was found and fixed in the later BIOS.

 

So, my assumption and conclusion here, is I think that BIOS F8 (when the initial RAID was configured), there was a bug allowing you to make a RAID0 using all three M.2 slots, and now in BIOS F9j, I'm assuming it's been fixed, so now you can only use the two PCIe M.2 slots, and they probably disabled the M2M SATA slot from being used because of failed RAID arrays just like what happened to mine.

 

It's probably how it's suppose to be and my computer was just working within a bug or something, I tried googling more about this and I actually found tons of stuff about people running two NVMe's, I haven't found a single setup thread about using all three together, so again, it seems like it was a bug and that's why it was working and now it's fixed in the latest release. 

 

Basically, no matter how I look at this, I just lost 1TB NVMe usable space on my boot drive so now I'm trying to find the cheapest reliable option for 2TB NVMe's lol.

 

We'll see what happens in a day or two if this stays up and running or if it fails again

[Bombastinator]

I got as far as “drive 3 is always the slow one” and I did that by skimming.  Nvme slots can go at different speeds depending on whether they’re pcie3 or Pcie4 and whether or not they attach to the cpu or the chipset.  Which does what is going to be motherboard specific

[bANONYMOUS]

So far everything has remained working, everything is good, however the BIOS is gone on boot, there's no splash screen, nothing, monitors stay at no signal and then it jumps straight to the Windows login screen. I tried mashing Delete on boot and it just locked up on boot and stays at a black screen. I tried Shift+restart to get into the trouble shooting power menu and rebooting to UEFI Settings and it just reboots the computer back into Windows. Tried installing the Gigabyte BIOS settings app and that also does nothing, so like, yes, the computer is working, but now the BIOS is gone and there's no way to access it.

 

This motherboard is clearly haunted, does anyone know of a pastor that specializes in computers? Cause this thing clearly has a poltergeist and I'm 99% sure I need to perform an exorcism at this point.

[Bombastinator]

3 hours ago, bANONYMOUS said:

So far everything has remained working, everything is good, however the BIOS is gone on boot, there's no splash screen, nothing, monitors stay at no signal and then it jumps straight to the Windows login screen. I tried mashing Delete on boot and it just locked up on boot and stays at a black screen. I tried Shift+restart to get into the trouble shooting power menu and rebooting to UEFI Settings and it just reboots the computer back into Windows. Tried installing the Gigabyte BIOS settings app and that also does nothing, so like, yes, the computer is working, but now the BIOS is gone and there's no way to access it.

 

This motherboard is clearly haunted, does anyone know of a pastor that specializes in computers? Cause this thing clearly has a poltergeist and I'm 99% sure I need to perform an exorcism at this point.

Different motherboards have different bios interrupt keys.  Again, motherboard specific.

[bANONYMOUS]

Yes I know, I'm saying the BIOS is gone, to enter the BIOS on a Gigabyte Aorus Xtreme Z390, you hit Delete, and F12 is for boot options, I've had this motherboard for a little over 2 years now and have been in the BIOS many many times, what I'm saying is when I boot the computer, my monitors don't turn on, they stay black and when they do turn on, the computer is already at the login screen, there is no splash screen anymore that says Aorus, there's no loading wheel when it's loading windows, nothing. It just boots, black screen, login screen, desktop.

 

I've also just recreated the entire thing and now I think this has something to do with Google. The rabbit hole continues.

 

I downloaded my entire Google Photo's backup again with Google Takeout, and this is what happened before, the download failed because Ethernet cut out and the entire computer glitched out, and the downloads failed, I tried to delete the uncompleted files which are .tgz files from Google Takeout, and it locked up the computer, couldn't do anything.

 

I connected to wifi this time cause I was running a new ethernet cable today to upgrade everything to cat6 so when I set it up I didn't have an ethernet cable in the studio anymore and when I was downloading everything from Google Takeout, I was on ethernet again, half way through downloading, computer glitches out and locks up for a second exactly like before, this time Wifi auto switched and the downloads continued, they worked, I have my entire Google Photo's Takeout.

 

This is were it get's weird, I extract the .tar files from the .tgz files because Google compresses twice for some reason, once I had all of the .tar files, I tried to delete the .tgz files as they're not needed anymore, it happened again, computer completely locked up, only the browser works, but the entire computer is locked up, I can still browse the web, listen to music, etc, but I can't even open the start menu or move a file explorer window, can't even open task manager to force close explorer so it re opens, nothing, had to hard reboot.

 

Now the plot thickens, I was going to try and reboot into recovery using shift+restart from the start menu, and it opened settings, and now my computer isn't activated anymore, and when I try to activate it says there's an error connecting to Microsoft.

 

This is a clean install of Windows 10 Pro downloaded from Microsoft, made the USB installer using Rufus in GTP for UEFI, I have CSM disabled in BIOS, It's currently now a RAID 0 using only M2A and M2P M.2 ports as those are the direct PCIe lanes so now that SATA controlled M.2 connector isn't on this RAID and that NVMe isn't even formated, it's just blank space right now. I only did all of the Windows updates, installed the latest Nvidia studio driver, and these files from Google seem to be the root cause.

 

I have the computer working again, and I wanted to test it out.

 

I took some random files off my external to the desktop, some random files downloaded, some installers downloaded, saved everything to the desktop, rebooted (computer is still not activated now and still won't activate)

 

I deleted each file one at a time, everything works right until I try to delete those .tgz files from Google Takeout, it locks up again.

 

The root cause, and now repeated steps exact with the identical result here, when I try to delete the .tgz files from Google Takeout, it locks up my computer and causes havoc.

 

Only issue now is I can't even get into the BIOS to reinstall Windows. Not entirely sure what to do here.

[Bombastinator]

6 minutes ago, bANONYMOUS said:

Yes I know, I'm saying the BIOS is gone, to enter the BIOS on a Gigabyte Aorus Xtreme Z390, you hit Delete, and F12 is for boot options, I've had this motherboard for a little over 2 years now and have been in the BIOS many many times, what I'm saying is when I boot the computer, my monitors don't turn on, they stay black and when they do turn on, the computer is already at the login screen, there is no splash screen anymore that says Aorus, there's no loading wheel when it's loading windows, nothing. It just boots, black screen, login screen, desktop.

 

I've also just recreated the entire thing and now I think this has something to do with Google. The rabbit hole continues.

 

I downloaded my entire Google Photo's backup again with Google Takeout, and this is what happened before, the download failed because Ethernet cut out and the entire computer glitched out, and the downloads failed, I tried to delete the uncompleted files which are .tgz files from Google Takeout, and it locked up the computer, couldn't do anything.

 

I connected to wifi this time cause I was running a new ethernet cable today to upgrade everything to cat6 so when I set it up I didn't have an ethernet cable in the studio anymore and when I was downloading everything from Google Takeout, I was on ethernet again, half way through downloading, computer glitches out and locks up for a second exactly like before, this time Wifi auto switched and the downloads continued, they worked, I have my entire Google Photo's Takeout.

 

This is were it get's weird, I extract the .tar files from the .tgz files because Google compresses twice for some reason, once I had all of the .tar files, I tried to delete the .tgz files as they're not needed anymore, it happened again, computer completely locked up, only the browser works, but the entire computer is locked up, I can still browse the web, listen to music, etc, but I can't even open the start menu or move a file explorer window, can't even open task manager to force close explorer so it re opens, nothing, had to hard reboot.

 

Now the plot thickens, I was going to try and reboot into recovery using shift+restart from the start menu, and it opened settings, and now my computer isn't activated anymore, and when I try to activate it says there's an error connecting to Microsoft.

 

This is a clean install of Windows 10 Pro downloaded from Microsoft, made the USB installer using Rufus in GTP for UEFI, I have CSM disabled in BIOS, It's currently now a RAID 0 using only M2A and M2P M.2 ports as those are the direct PCIe lanes so now that SATA controlled M.2 connector isn't on this RAID and that NVMe isn't even formated, it's just blank space right now. I only did all of the Windows updates, installed the latest Nvidia studio driver, and these files from Google seem to be the root cause.

 

I have the computer working again, and I wanted to test it out.

 

I took some random files off my external to the desktop, some random files downloaded, some installers downloaded, saved everything to the desktop, rebooted (computer is still not activated now and still won't activate)

 

I deleted each file one at a time, everything works right until I try to delete those .tgz files from Google Takeout, it locks up again.

 

The root cause, and now repeated steps exact with the identical result here, when I try to delete the .tgz files from Google Takeout, it locks up my computer and causes havoc.

 

Only issue now is I can't even get into the BIOS to reinstall Windows. Not entirely sure what to do here.

Bios can’t be actually gone or windows wouldn’t be able to load in the first place.  Windows is just a program that runs on top of the bios.

Edited April 10, 2021 by Bombastinator

[bANONYMOUS]

Yes I know, I'm saying it's gone from being accessed, the entire boot splash is gone, if I just let it boot up normally, it boots up to a black screen and just sits there, and the monitors don't come on at the login screen, there is no BIOS splash screen, no windows loading screen, nothing.
If I hitting delete on boot while it's at the black screen, it just freezes the computer and it will stay at a black screen and nothing happens, I assumed at first that the BIOS isn't allowing video output with display port, so I tried with HDMI, still nothing, I tried hitting CTRL ATL DEL to reboot out of BIOS and that doesn't work either so it's legit frozen.

If I shift+restart from within Windows and in the trouble shooting blue screen, try to access UEFI Options (which reboots into the BIOS), it just reboots the computer to the black screen, and after a few seconds, the login screen appears.

If I install the Gigabyte BIOS software to control the BIOS from within Windows, I can see options, change options, do whatever, but nothing saves, when I reboot it's back to the old settings.

there is no way to access the BIOS right now and this happened since disabling CSM again and removing that one M2M port from the RAID array.

 

As for the current issue with the computer locking up, Windows is still deactivated and ethernet doesn't work at all. Just to test the new cable I plugged it into my laptop and it works fine, so the cable works, internet works, everything works until it's plugged into my desktop. And all of these issues start as soon as I try to delete those .tgz files from Google Takeout.

 

Totally throwing this in the air, but this sounds like a Virus from Google, like, it's super unlikely, but this has Virus written ALL over it. Download a file and it disables ethernet, try to delete the file and it crashes the computer, every time I try to delete the files something else goes wrong. The only thing is this is a fresh install of Windows 10 Pro from Microsoft with nothing installed. AND I'm using the identical build and USB Installer on my laptop and it's working perfect so the download isn't corrupt, the USB installer isn't corrupt, laptop is running the identical Nvidia studio driver so that's not the issue.

 

I also can't reboot into safe mode now, it just keeps rebooting back into the regular Windows desktop.

[bANONYMOUS]

After installing Windows the second time, I guess I didn't change the boot properties and I was able to boot from a linux live usb just by having it plugged in and it booted from it as t he first boot priority, I accessed the Windows partition from within Linux, deleted the .tgz files from the Windows Desktop directory, rebooted, and there was a BIOS splash screen again, Windows loading screen again, got back into the Windows desktop, ethernet works now.. What the actual F..

 

This is legit 100% a virus from Google. The .tgz files from Google Takeout are 100% the root cause of all of this.

 

The first time I downloaded the Google Takeout files the ethernet cuts out and they failed, I try to delete the uncompleted files and it locks up, wiped the BIOS and downgraded thinking that was the issue, didn't change anything, upgraded back to the latest version, reinstalled Windows, download the Google Takeout files again, ethernet cuts out exactly like it did before but I had wifi connected this time and the files completed, I extracted my data from them, and then tried to delete the .tgz files and it locks up the computer again.

Was able to get into a live environment of Linux this time, deleted the .tgz files from Google Takeout, reboot, everything is fixed, everything works, Ethernet is back, BIOS is back, everything.

 

This is legit some type of virus from Google.. spooky