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Windows not booting

Asad17
By Asad17
in Troubleshooting
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Hi guys,

 

Just signed up for the forums and I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this so I'm sorry if I get it wrong. I'm having some trouble with my PC and would appreciate any help on the issue. I'll list the exact specs of the PC below this post. I built it about 8 months ago, but I only used it for about a month in total because I was away. It was running fine a few days ago but it crashed and restarted all of a sudden and I wasn't sure what happened. After the first unexpected crash, it went into a loop of crashing every time it got to the windows logo when booting up. I thought it was just something wrong with the windows and therefore made a bootable windows 7 USB and tried to boot it from there. The PC tried to launch the windows setup upon boot but after loading some of the files it crashed again. To be sure I tried the same thing with windows 8.1 and windows 10 USB as well and all of them resulted the same way. At this point I thought maybe the USB I was working with was at fault and got a windows 7 CD from a friend and tried booting it from that just to have the same result as before. 

 

At this point I realized the issue might be hardware related rather than just the windows as I had thought earlier. I tried my components with my older PC (which has its own problems btw) and the hard drive, power supply and the GPU functioned fine. I also removed the CPU to see if there might have been any bent pins that I might've caused during the initial build but everything looks okay. So my question is, does anyone know what might be the problem with my PC?

 

I've noticed before the PC crashes it flashes the RAM and CPU LED lights that are on the motherboard (labelled as EZ DEBUG). The manual for the motherboard only indicate what these lights mean if they turn on and prevent the PC from booting but the lights only flash right before the PC crashes. It seems unlikely that both ram sticks would fail together so I doubt its the problem with the ram sticks, I have also tried using the rams at different slots without any changes.

 

Specs:

Intel Core i5 6600k 3.50GHz (had it overclocked to 4.00GHz but set it back to 3.50 GHz after all this happened)

2 x 8 Kingston Hyper X fury black DDR 4 memory 2133Hz

1TB Western Digital Hard drive (don't remember the exact model)

MSI Z170A PC Mate motherboard

AMD XFX R9 390 Graphics Card

EVGA 700W Bronze Power Supply

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It sounds like RAM issue. Get Memtest and test with that. And/or you can try with each stick and each slot until you find working one. It can also be PSU, so if you have another to use, try that too. Also try with Linux.

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22 hours ago, LoGiCalDrm said:

It sounds like RAM issue. Get Memtest and test with that. And/or you can try with each stick and each slot until you find working one. It can also be PSU, so if you have another to use, try that too. Also try with Linux.

I'm not sure but I doubt its a ram issue. I have two sticks installed so its really unlikely that they both failed together. I tried running with one stick at a time with different ram slots but the problem still remained. I haven't tried memtest though. 

I'm sure its not the PSU, I tried using another PSU that I had from a previous PC and still had the same issue. The only thing I can't really test is the motherboard and processor since I don't have another motherboard that supports my current CPU.

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21 hours ago, jdubs said:

I second the memory tests. I'd also recommend a barebones evaluation just for the sake of sanity (AKA run the system without the dedicated GPU and a single stick of RAM).

Already tried that, with just the CPU and rams installed on the motherboard. Without any GPU or hard drives and tried to boot from a USB and a DVD but still encountered the same problem. Do you think it could be the motherboard? That's what I suspect the most.

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1 hour ago, Asad17 said:

Already tried that, with just the CPU and rams installed on the motherboard. Without any GPU or hard drives and tried to boot from a USB and a DVD but still encountered the same problem. Do you think it could be the motherboard? That's what I suspect the most.

I normally don't like to point to the motherboard just because it's so easy to pin the cause of a problem on a component that links other components together. But at this point, yes, because you've already validated that your other components work in another system, and you've tried other boot mediums such as various OS installation CDs and USBs.

 

My last random suggestion would be to flip/reset the CMOS if you haven't done so already.

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1 hour ago, jdubs said:

I normally don't like to point to the motherboard just because it's so easy to pin the cause of a problem on a component that links other components together. But at this point, yes, because you've already validated that your other components work in another system, and you've tried other boot mediums such as various OS installation CDs and USBs.

 

My last random suggestion would be to flip/reset the CMOS if you haven't done so already.

Resetting the CMOS was actually one of the first things I tried before I started testing the actual hardware. Also tried updating the bios using a USB. The update itself went without a hitch but the problem still remained the same.

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  • 3 weeks later...
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Update:

 

Bought a new motherboard and I'm still facing the same issue. Anyone know what the problem could be now? The processor is the only thing I haven't tested independently. Could there be a fault in that? I didn't think the PC would run at all if there was a problem with the processor. Any help on this would be really appreciated. 

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  • 3 weeks later...
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Update: In case anyone else faces the same issue, it turns out it was indeed the processor that wasn't working properly. Got a new processor and everything works fine now. I'm still curious why the processor would fail like that though, anyone have any ideas? Could it have been because it was overclocked and my cpu cooler couldn't keep up?

Anyway if you do encounter this make sure you test everything else before deciding to buy a new processor.

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