Initial troubleshooting ideas?

LudoTheGreat · March 10, 2015

So I am building a new PC and giving my old one to a family member. I decided to pull out my Intel 730 SSD and use my WD Black 1TB drive as the main drive. I also pulled out the 7870 as the MSI Z77A has onboard video. They don't need the 7870, so I figured I would sell it.

I set the WD drive as my primary, plug one of my monitors into the onboard DVI, and pop in the Win7 home premium 64bit disk and start installing Windows. I should say I was running Win10 tech preview with the video card and SSD installed just fine, since the initial release of the tech preview.

I delete all partitions on the WD drive and create everything new and start installing Windows. It did all the initial install process fine. On the first reboot it BSODs, I don't know exactly where because I had left the room while it finished the setup.

I turn the PC off and back on and it doesn't post. Fans spin, drives (hdd and optical) spins and everything looks like it's going to post but it just shuts off. Then it tries again. Over and over in a loop. No beeps, no indicator lights, nothing. Just continually tries to post.

I kill the power after a few attempts of it rebooting and give it a few minutes. Turn it back on and the same thing. Only this time it does it about 3 times and then says it could not preform the OC and asks if I was to continue with default settings or enter setup. I enter setup and set everything to default (it should have been in the first place).

Now everything is set to default, I check that the video and HDD are all set proper and showing up properly. Everything looks right. Boot to Win7 install disk again and after the first reboot during the "Windows is preforming initial setup" process with the Windows logo and all, it BSODs (with some weird graphic artifacting) and starts the weird reboot cycle all over again. I let it do it's thing a couple of times in hopes that I would get the OC error again, but nothing. At this point it was too late in the night for me to do any troublehsooting and I just went to bed so I could get up at 4:30a.m. for work.

Off the top of my head I don't know what could be wrong. I will be troubleshooting as soon as I get home from work, but where do I start? I am thinking maybe its the HDD or the video? Video because of the weird artifacting during the BSOD and the fact that the "detecting video settings" process of the install was probably the part the it actually BSODed at.

Any suggestions are welcome. Here is the Parts list for the PC, minus the 7870 which I can reinstall to troubleshoot: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/KLpYt6

Beltboy · March 10, 2015

My first guess would be the on board video. If the HDD was in the system before even if not primary I'd expect you'd have noticed something if it was failing. Try it with the 7870 back in just to confirm its that or not, you can always pick up a cheap video card if needs be.

tmlhalo · March 10, 2015

Could try clearing the CMOS. Maybe you missed a default setting.

LudoTheGreat · March 10, 2015

My first guess would be the on board video. If the HDD was in the system before even if not primary I'd expect you'd have noticed something if it was failing. Try it with the 7870 back in just to confirm its that or not, you can always pick up a cheap video card if needs be.

My thought as well. I think I will start with readding the video card.

I forgot to add that the reason I got the SSD was because the HDD was starting to make some noise. You can hear it working while installing to. Not really bad noises, but you can definitely hear it working.