My PC keeps restarting, how do I fix it?

[Carson.C]

Hi all,

 

I have recently built a pc and managed to get a GPU on hand, although it was a second hand but it's only a temp card. I had some problem whilst installing Windows, I have followed JayzTwoCent's video on what to do after building a PC but the first problem was that I had a blue screen while trying to boot to window and it said something along the line of "Inaccessible boot drive" So I decided to go back to a previous stage when Window haven't downloaded the program which keep blue screening my pc. 

 

Now after having that sorted, there's one update which Window can't do no matter how many time I have restarted (It told me to restart it) and my pc randomly restarts and I don't know why. I know it can't be my PSU because it's new and the GPU I got (RX480) doesn't need 650W so what seems to be the problem?

 

Thank you all in advance 

[Bombastinator]

8 minutes ago, Carson.C said:

Hi all,

 

I have recently built a pc and managed to get a GPU on hand, although it was a second hand but it's only a temp card. I had some problem whilst installing Windows, I have followed JayzTwoCent's video on what to do after building a PC but the first problem was that I had a blue screen while trying to boot to window and it said something along the line of "Inaccessible boot drive" So I decided to go back to a previous stage when Window haven't downloaded the program which keep blue screening my pc. 

 

Now after having that sorted, there's one update which Window can't do no matter how many time I have restarted (It told me to restart it) and my pc randomly restarts and I don't know why. I know it can't be my PSU because it's new and the GPU I got (RX480) doesn't need 650W so what seems to be the problem?

 

Thank you all in advance 

A PSU being new makes it less likely to be a problem but doesn’t completely negate it as a possibility. 
there are pinned posts in the troubleshooting section which list the sorts of information likely to be needed to solve a problem. Many of the more knowledgeable poster won’t even reply to a troubleshooting post without this data simply because it is so often needed that they find it frustrating. I suggest adding it even if you don’t think it will be needed just because many people most likely to be able to answer your query won’t even look at it without that data.

[BadBoyHaloCat]

51 minutes ago, Carson.C said:

Hi all,

 

I have recently built a pc and managed to get a GPU on hand, although it was a second hand but it's only a temp card. I had some problem whilst installing Windows, I have followed JayzTwoCent's video on what to do after building a PC but the first problem was that I had a blue screen while trying to boot to window and it said something along the line of "Inaccessible boot drive" So I decided to go back to a previous stage when Window haven't downloaded the program which keep blue screening my pc. 

 

Now after having that sorted, there's one update which Window can't do no matter how many time I have restarted (It told me to restart it) and my pc randomly restarts and I don't know why. I know it can't be my PSU because it's new and the GPU I got (RX480) doesn't need 650W so what seems to be the problem?

 

Thank you all in advance 

What do you mean by "restart"? Is it a hard reset (screen suddenly black, fans halt instantly, any RGB goes off, then starts back up) or is it a soft reboot (you see the "Rebooting..."/"Shutting down..." screen, then a hard reset occurs)?

[Carson.C]

9 minutes ago, BadBoyHaloCat said:

What do you mean by "restart"? Is it a hard reset (screen suddenly black, fans halt instantly, any RGB goes off, then starts back up) or is it a soft reboot (you see the "Rebooting..."/"Shutting down..." screen, then a hard reset occurs)?

So the lights on my keyboards goes black, the screen goes black and then it reboots, showing the logo of my motherboard and then the Microsoft login screen

[BadBoyHaloCat]

Just now, Carson.C said:

So the lights on my keyboards goes black, the screen goes black and then it reboots, showing the logo of my motherboard and then the Microsoft login screen

Sounds like a hard reset. Have you made sure the main motherboard power connector is in tight?

[Carson.C]

1 minute ago, BadBoyHaloCat said:

Sounds like a hard reset. Have you made sure the main motherboard power connector is in tight?

That doesn't sound like it's the problem, it usually reset when I'm doing something "intensive" like running minecraft and opening and closing two tabs lol

 

[BadBoyHaloCat]

Just now, Carson.C said:

That doesn't sound like it's the problem, it usually reset when I'm doing something "intensive" like running minecraft and opening and closing two tabs lol

 

You might be able to find info in the event viewer.

[Bombastinator]

16 minutes ago, Carson.C said:

That doesn't sound like it's the problem, it usually reset when I'm doing something "intensive" like running minecraft and opening and closing two tabs lol

 

So when you are drawing more power. 

[Carson.C]

1 hour ago, Bombastinator said:

So when you are drawing more power. 

I don't think that opening two tabs is gonna use more power lol

 

[Bombastinator]

4 minutes ago, Carson.C said:

I don't think that opening two tabs is gonna use more power lol

 

You used the word “intensive”. When CPUs do things they draw more power than when they are just sitting there.  It used to be that a cpu would draw the same amount of power whether it did things or not but that hasn’t been true since centrino.  It was noticed that the less a machine runs the cooler it can be so when it dos need to do something it can do it faster.  Thus things like idle temp being very different than load temp became more of a thing.  Might also may be just accessing memory though.

[Carson.C]

Just now, Bombastinator said:

You used the word “intensive”. When CPUs do things they draw more power than when they are just sitting there.  It used to be that a cpu would draw the same amount of power whether it did things or not but that hasn’t been true since centrino.  It was noticed that the less a machine runs the cooler it can be so when it dos need to do something it can do it faster.  Thus things like idle temp being very different than load temp became more of a thing.  Might also may be just accessing memory though.

Well I'm currently watching a youtube video and everything is fine, no reboots

[Bombastinator]

Just now, Carson.C said:

Well I'm currently watching a youtube video and everything is fine, no reboots

Video isn’t very intensive.  It’s a pretty stable stream and decoding is done mostly with dedicated hardware these days. If it’s a power thing it would happen when you suddenly draw more power and cause a transient spike.  That is not to say it IS power though. Testing the memory couldn’t hurt.  Sometimes problems can happen when there is a fault high up in the memory register and unless that memory is used nothing happens. Memory problems and PSU problems are the two most common crash after boot things. Video cards have memory in them too of course, but this doesn’t sound a lot like a video card problem.

[Carson.C]

1 minute ago, Bombastinator said:

Video isn’t very intensive.  It’s a pretty stable stream and decoding is done mostly with dedicated hardware these days. If it’s a power thing it would happen when you suddenly draw more power and cause a transient spike.  That is not to say it IS power though. Testing the memory couldn’t hurt.  Sometimes problems can happen when there is a fault high up in the memory register and unless that memory is used nothing happens. Memory problems and PSU problems are the two most common crash after boot things. Video cards have memory in them too of course, but this doesn’t sound a lot like a video card problem.

nvm the video just crashed I thought it might be the window problem, perhaps I didn't boot the window correctly. Now I just need to find out how to delete my current window and reinstall it 

[Bombastinator]

1 minute ago, Carson.C said:

nvm the video just crashed I thought it might be the window problem, perhaps I didn't boot the window correctly. Now I just need to find out how to delete my current window and reinstall it 

Do you mean reinstall windows10?

[Carson.C]

1 minute ago, Bombastinator said:

Do you mean reinstall windows10?

yeah delete the whole thing and reinstall it again 

[Bombastinator]

49 minutes ago, Carson.C said:

yeah delete the whole thing and reinstall it again 

It’s usually done from a USB key used as a drive.  One needs a spare USB key of course.  I’m not sure what size.  There are downloadable files for just such a thing I’m not sure how they are installed on the thumb drive.  A microsoft key for the appropriate OS will also be wanted.  Key codes for some earlier versions of windows also work. It’s quite complex.  There are companies that do nothing but sell such keys.  I understand they are not immediately needed.  There should be numerous videos on how to do this online.  One can also buy a thumb drive with the whole thing preinstalled from microsoft which is convenient but as I understand it also fairly expensive.

Edited June 19, 2021 by Bombastinator

[Carson.C]

2 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

It’s usually done from a USB key used as a drive.  One needs a spare USB key of course.  I’m not sure what size.  There are downloadable files for just such a thing I’m not sure how they are installed on the thumb drive.  A microsoft key for the appropriate OS will also be wanted.  Key codes for some earlier versions of windows also work. It’s quite complex.  There are companies that do nothing but sell such keys.  I understand they are not immediately needed.  There should be numerous videos on how to do this online.  One can also buy a thumb drive with the whole thing preinstalled from microsoft which is convenient but as I understand it also fairly expensive.

Yeah I've done it before lol, but now the problem is I don't want to waste more space downloading another OS into my drive, like what do I do with my old OS once I've downloaded my new Window. Also, in the BIOS it had three drives even though I only have 2, M.2, One of them said something about "___(drive name)___ Window Manager" and I don't know which drive to flash it on 

[Bombastinator]

9 minutes ago, Carson.C said:

Yeah I've done it before lol, but now the problem is I don't want to waste more space downloading another OS into my drive, like what do I do with my old OS once I've downloaded my new Window. Also, in the BIOS it had three drives even though I only have 2, M.2, One of them said something about "___(drive name)___ Window Manager" and I don't know which drive to flash it on 

You might have two partitions on one drive.  I can see a bootable file set being recognized as a seperate drive.  I’ve never been clear myself as to what exactly makes a drive “bootable”

[Carson.C]

1 minute ago, Bombastinator said:

You might have two partitions on one drive.  I can see a bootable file set being recognized as a seperate drive.  I’ve never been clear myself as to what exactly makes a drive “bootable”

Does this mean anything?

 

[Bombastinator]

39 minutes ago, Carson.C said:

Does this mean anything?

 

Looks like 3 partitions on drive zero which seems to be a system drive. The efi partition makes it bootable. thats ufei stuff.  The second partition is NTFS which implies it is windows as only windows generally uses ntfs.  Microsoft doesn’t particularly like anyone but them using ntfs and tends to make it annoying for anything else to deal with.  the stuff in the descriptor in parentheses is all OS stuff, implying that the second partition is mostly just windows.  There is also a recovery partition (the third part). I don’t know what that does exactly, but it could very well be part of windows too. The space given for each partition is not accurately described by the graphic the fist bit is 1/10th of a gig, the third is half a gig, and the center one is the entire rest of the drive.  I don’t know how much win10 needs, but very likely not even half of that central 223gb section so there likely room for other stuff too.  The first and third partitions are very small relative to the middle one, and I would think windows wouldn’t list them.  If you’ve got a third partition visible in windows it would likely be part of the second partition on drive zero, the single partition on drive 1, or from another something not mentioned. 
Disk 1 is a single ntfs partition so it it probably your data drive that has only stuff used by windows on it.  It’s sort of difficult for anything BUT windows to deal with ntfs.  From the looks of things drive 0 is bootable, and drive 1 isn’t. There are some odd sub-partitioning methods where files can appear as whole partitions.  That’s how boot camp worked back in the day.

 

If you’ve got a “bootable” third partition and nothing else is plugged in it could be on either drive.  There’s room, and it could very possibly be something that only windows would see as such

Edited June 19, 2021 by Bombastinator

[Carson.C]

5 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

Looks like 3 partitions on drive zero which seems to be a system drive. The efi partition makes it bootable. thats ufei stuff.  The second partition is NTFS which implies it is windows as only windows generally uses ntfs.  Microsoft doesn’t particularly like anyone but them using ntfs and tends to make it annoying for anything else to deal with.  the stuff in the descriptor in parentheses is all OS stuff, implying that the second partition is mostly just windows.  There is also a recovery partition (the third part). I don’t know what that does exactly, but it could very well be part of windows too. The space given for each partition is not accurately described by the graphic the fist bit is 1/10th of a gig, the third is half a gig, and the center one is the entire rest of the drive.  I don’t know how much win10 needs, but very likely not even half of that central 223gb section so there likely room for other stuff too.  The first and third partitions are very small relative to the middle one, and I would think windows wouldn’t list them.  If you’ve got a third partition visible in windows it would likely be part of the second partition on drive zero, the single partition on drive 1, or from another something not mentioned. 
Disk 1 is a single ntfs partition so it it probably your data drive that has only stuff used by windows on it.  It’s sort of difficult for anything BUT windows to deal with ntfs.  From the looks of things drive 0 is bootable, and drive 1 isn’t. There are some odd sub-partitioning methods where files can appear as whole partitions.  That’s how boot camp worked back in the day.

 

If you’ve got a “bootable” third partition and nothing else is plugged in it could be on either drive.  There’s room, and it could very possibly be something that only windows would see as such

Okay thanks :)) I'm just concern of what would happen to my old OS if I install another Window OS on top of it

[Bombastinator]

1 minute ago, Carson.C said:

Okay thanks :)) I'm just concern of what would happen to my old OS if I install another Window OS on top of it

Well if you pull drive zero, nothing.  The thumb drive would simply install the new win10 elsewhere, probably drive1. If you’ve got a messed up windows install I think all of it is on drive0.  I don’t know how much or what on drive0 would be overwritten by a full OS reinstall.  If you’ve got anything on drive0 you want to keep backing it up elsewhere might be the better part of valor. Windows now has various levels of reinstall though. I don’t know what they are called or what they all do.  “Refresh” is one though.  They generally rewrite and reorganize only part of an install. If this is an older AMD machine there was a recent jayztwocaents where he goes over various problems he had with early ryzen, one of which was bootloops.  You might find useful info there. I don’t know if you’ve got an intel or AMD system though so it might be useless.