Windows 7 BSOD/Reboot loop

[Porkey]

Hello LTT forum.

Today I am faced with a particularly frustrating issue. Recently (about a week ago) I replaced my motherboard and CPU. Before the upgrade, I was using an ASUS M24N68-AM SE2, with a Phenom X4 9500 overclocked to 2.5GHz, with 4GB of DDR RAM.

I have upgraded to an MSI H77MA-G43 with a Xeon E3-1225, with four 2GB sticks of DDR3. Since the upgrade, I have been considering a power supply upgrade, as I am running a CX430M to support my system, and my graphocs card was recently upgraded to a GTX 950.

 

Knowing that I was pushing my PSU to the edge with my last few upgrades, I had neen taking it easy on my system since the MB upgrade. I was trying not to put too much load on both the CPU and GPU, save for playing a few games (namely Blade and Soul and Mabinogi).

 

I leave my computer turned on 24/7, and I leave my system to run (GPU-only) Folding@Home when I go to sleep. Yesterday, I woke up to find that my computer had restarted itself at some point throughout the night. Okay, so no more folding until I get a better PSU.

 

I used my computer as usual throughout the day, and at some point later in the day, I noticed that I was putting a lot of strain on the system. I was playing Blade & Soul when I remembered that I had something to check real quick in Mabinogi. I left BnS running and opened Mabi, and while I waited for Mabi to start up, I started watching YouTube videos in Chrome.

 

At some point I checked Task Manager to see constant 100% CPU usage, all of my RAM being used, and I knew that my GPU had to be at 100% load as well. Just as I went to close BnS, the computer shut down and restarted on its own.

Woah, okay, so I know why that happened. From now on, only one thing open at a time. One. At. A. Time.

 

I loaded Mabinogi back up again as soon as the computer restarted. I got into the game and started playing normally, until 10 minutes later, the system shut down and rebooted again on its own.

This time, Mabinogi was the only thing that I had running. The game is SINGLE-threaded ONLY, so it could only have put 25-30% worth of CPU load on the system at a time. Usually my GPU gets loaded up tp 30-40% while playing Mabinogi. So, when the system restarted this time, it started to seem pretty strange.

 

I Iet the system reboot on its own again, and gave it a minute or two to see if it would restart on its own again. The system sat at the Windows desktop for a while and didn't restart. Since the system had restarted under low load, I figured maybe the PSU had just gotten too hot when it restarted the first time, and was still cooling down the second time it ended up restarting. 

I figured that I'd give it one more go at Mabinogi, now that the system seems to have "cooled down" and hadn't restarted from sitting at the Windows desktop.

Another 10 or so minutes of gameplay, and the system shut down again.

 

At this point, I called it a night and shut the system down. I switched the power switch on the PSU to "off" and went to bed. 5 hours later, I come back to start troubleshooting. The system turns on fine, and works for about half an hour before Windows bluescreens. The cause of the blue screen was apparently my Razer Diamondback 3G's driver.

 

Okay, now this is getting really weird. That driver has never given me problems in the 5 years that I've owned the mouse. Okay, so I uninstall the mouse drivers, and then reinstall them. Reboot.

 

Now, Windows is failing to boot at all. A few seconds after the Windows loading screen comes up, the OS bluesreens and instantly goes back to POSTing. I spent a considerable amount of time trying to get any information from the bluescreen because each time the system bluescreened, the blue screen itself was only shown for less than 0.1 of a second. Apparently the bluescreen error message that I was getting was 0x0000007B (I think. I will re-check my notes after posting this). It was an error message that apparently meant "Boot device is unaccessible."

 

Okay, so I do some Googling and apparently this new bluescreen can be caused by a lot of things; a corrupt MBR, SATA controller mode set tp IDE and not AHCI, or a boot sector virus...

 

I ended up downloading the Windows Defender Offline tool and creating a bootable Windows Defender USB stick that's apparently supposed to scan my system for boot sector viruses.

 

At first the WDO tool refused to scan my system at all, but after a few reboots and retries, the tool started scanning. Since then I've had the tool freeze on me once after an hour of scanning, and the system has yet again randomly shut down on me twice during a scan. As I type this post up on my almost dead phone, my system is upstairs trying to complete yet another scan. I have removed my GPU from the system to take as much load off of the skitzo PSU as possible.

 

Since my forst attempt at using WDO tonscan my system, I have tried again to boot into Windows. Now, the system just restarts any time I try to boot from my C drive. No bluescreens; the system just instantly goes back to the POST screen.

 

I apologise if this post is unformatted, cluttered or etc. I have hastily typed as much info as I can on my dying phone. To leave off; my current full system specs are as follows;

 

CPU: Xeon E3-1225

CPU cooler: H100i

RAM: 4x2GB generic DDR3

GPU: GTX 950 (currently removed from system)

Storage: Kingston SSDNow v300 120GB

PSU: Corsair CX430M

Case: Corsair 350D

Fans: One 140 and one 120mm front intake

 

Before my Windows install comepletely died, I tried safe mode, system repair, sfc /scannow, last known good configuration; NOTHING worked.

If anyone has any idea what could be going on, your input would be much appreciated.

[HPWebcamAble]

Holy wall of text batman.

I'm not reading all of that. Sorry.

 

From what I gathered skimming it, you've got a CX PSU. Try another PSU, that is likely the issue.

[Porkey]

Yeah sorry for the wall of text. As I said in my long post; I had been planning on getting a good PSU for a while now. It's just that my whole system has gone to hell at the moment.

[VeryDogeTV]

Aaaaalright holy mothers of Text...

TLDR:

 

Remove 3x of the RAM or remove 2x ram if they are Duo Slot rams. 

if it works, try figuring out if one of the RAMS are dead