Unable to pinpoint what component is stopping windows 10 to boot

[PeachyKireen]

Hi,

I’m new to building pc, and I thought I’d give it a try. I visited pcpartpicker to check the compatibility of each components so I wouldn’t run into any unexpected issues. Unfortunately, if I’m here today, is because I ran into some issues. It all comes down to booting up windows 10. Once I was done building the pc with the following specs:

 

• Case: NZXT H510 - CA H510B
• RAM: Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB DDR4 3200Mhz 
• SSD: Samsung 970 EVO Plus 1TB - M.2 (2280)
• Motherboard: ASUS ROG Strix B450-F Gaming II AMD AM4
• Power supply: EVGA SuperNOVA 650 Ga, 80 plus gold 650w
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600G - Series Cezanne (Zen 3)

 

I chose to go with a APU since the market is crazy at the moment and I thought it’d be alright to start a build with that. Anyways, I’m able to POST it, enter the BIOS and stay within it, change settings and all that. However, as soon as I reset it to boot up windows 10, it either way freezes to a black screen, loads the “press any keys to boot up CD/DVD” line then goes to the windows logo then freezes. I never get the same pattern, so I thought it was a RAM problem. Ended up returning the aforementioned RAM, and bought the same model yesterday, thinking it could have been a defect with the component. 

Then, I decided to download windows 10 on flash drive thinking it was the CD that made the whole thing freeze. Made sure that the USB (and CD too) were the first thing to run from the BIOS menu. Tried to research if I had to have special settings on from the BIOS, tweaked around with Legacy or UEFI setting, still nothing. 

 

Additionally, I tried downloading Linux Mint with a flash drive, got to booting menu. After pressing “start install”, it either would restart the pc or just go to a black screen and do nothing. 

 

At this point, I am a little lost since I don’t really know what to do. I’m not sure whether the motherboard is defective, or even the SSD. Always stuck on a boot loop, sometimes get the blinking white cursor over black screen. 

 

If anyone ever encountered this type of issue, I would really appreciate their feedback on how they dealt with it. If you need more information, I’ll be happy to share. Thank you for your time!

[LogicalDrm]

-> Moved to Troubleshooting

[Mark Kaine]

download this ISO on an empty USB flash drive with at least 5GB space, make sure to get the ISO itself.

 

then reset cmos (remove the mobo battery for 10 minutes while the pc is turned off and unplugged from power) then dont attach the cdrom drive , only insert the USB flash drive with the ISO, turn on the pc... and well, hope it boots into the Windows install environment (it should)

 

if that still doesn't work it might be your m2 drive, try with a 2.5 SATA drive, for example a crucial mx500 250gb as they're relatively cheap and good quality (if you do that you obviously need to remove the m2 drive, you can install that again later once windows is installed)