Win10 unbootable (friends machine)

Psittac · July 17, 2016

Ok, so a friend of mine is blind and I have been his IT guy for a number of years. First met him to fix his laptop. But anyways I built him an AMD machine about a year ago and a few month's ago it kept becoming unbootable (sometimes a couple day's, once a couple weeks). I changed a bunch of stuff and it seamed the problem was the generic psu which must have been giving the ssd fit's. I put my corsair psu in and got an antec for my machine. It has been fine for probably 2-3 month's, then yet again it won't load windows and the startup can't be recovered. I put an EVGA psu in, upgraded the ram, and installed a 1tb hdd as a back up. Anyone have any thought's on why it might be doing this? Since he's blind I don't know if it's miss-use, or if it's hardware related. Every last piece of equipment is new, the only two possible hardware issues would be southbridge on mobo (an asus) or the corsair psu which is now an evga.

One last thought, I know his mom has opened the case at least once, when I went to get it last week the OS disc was no longer inside the case and she mentioned something about wanting to clean inside it. No way to know if she tried to clean it and messed something up.

But the machine is back up and running, I'm going to create a restore point and image the OS onto the hdd and my own computer and I will leave a windows 10 upgrade disc in for recovery attempts.

Just looking for thought's because this is frustrating, expensive, and very time consuming.

edit: the whole time it would pass memory and cpu stress test's for 12+ hours, thought's on other tests?

ARikozuM · July 17, 2016

28 minutes ago, Psittac said:

Ok, so a friend of mine is blind and I have been his IT guy for a number of years. First met him to fix his laptop. But anyways I built him an AMD machine about a year ago and a few month's ago it kept becoming unbootable (sometimes a couple day's, once a couple weeks). I changed a bunch of stuff and it seamed the problem was the generic psu which must have been giving the ssd fit's. I put my corsair psu in and got an antec for my machine. It has been fine for probably 2-3 month's, then yet again it won't load windows and the startup can't be recovered. I put an EVGA psu in, upgraded the ram, and installed a 1tb hdd as a back up. Anyone have any thought's on why it might be doing this? Since he's blind I don't know if it's miss-use, or if it's hardware related. Every last piece of equipment is new, the only two possible hardware issues would be southbridge on mobo (an asus) or the corsair psu which is now an evga.

One last thought, I know his mom has opened the case at least once, when I went to get it last week the OS disc was no longer inside the case and she mentioned something about wanting to clean inside it. No way to know if she tried to clean it and messed something up.

But the machine is back up and running, I'm going to create a restore point and image the OS onto the hdd and my own computer and I will leave a windows 10 upgrade disc in for recovery attempts.

Just looking for thought's because this is frustrating, expensive, and very time consuming.

edit: the whole time it would pass memory and cpu stress test's for 12+ hours, thought's on other tests?

How old is the SSD and how large? I would disconnect and redo the wiring to be sure it not a loose connection.

Psittac · July 18, 2016

19 hours ago, ARikozuM said:

How old is the SSD and how large? I would disconnect and redo the wiring to be sure it not a loose connection.

so I haven't checked the cables yet, I read your post and meant to do that but forgot. I did however run aida64 for 2.5 hours with everything stressed including hard drives and it passed.

I came up with a theory, the other day when I was scooting his tower closer to the router I bumped the reset button, it's right on the corner and extremely easy to hit. Since he is blind and it is close to the headphone jack, maybe he is accidently hitting reset and eventually it corrupted the OS. I'm going to remove the reset pins and then check all of the cables again, maybe it's just a loose power connection that causes power fluctuations or a loose sata cable like you said, so even though it's stable during my testing, it happens once in a blue moon.

Thanks for the response, it'll help me cover all of the bases.