Computer hasn't booted in 2 days - Can't install Windows

[Droidbot]

5 minutes ago, ShadowWolf810 said:

Perfect, thanks so much. I almost got the Win7 UEFI to work. It installed all the way through a reboot, and then froze on finishing. It even set the 960 as a Windows Boot Manager in BIOS, bet I could have gotten it working but its just not worth all the hassle, and apparently UEFI isn't fully implemented in Win7 so its not really doing anything, boot times aren't any faster, can't use secure boot, etc. Either way its like the end of an era, :(. 

 

You wanna PM about the other stuff when I find the time? 

Yeah sure, my PM's are always open.. just toss me a message

[ShadowWolf810]

@Droidbot So I'm trying to install Windows 10....... lol. I had my 960 all as unallocated space, hit "new" and it created 4 partitions. Recovery, Sytem MSR Reserved and Primary. Put it on Primary and hit install and it says "We couldn't create a new partition or locate an existing one, see setup log files." Uhhh one day things will just work lol. Any thoughts? 

[ShadowWolf810]

@Droidbot

Still up trying to install Win 10 now. Spent a couple hours with the same issue from above of it not making the partitions. Unplugged all other drives and all but 1 stick of RAM and all my PCIe cards and that immediately stopped. Now I've spent a few hours trying to actually get through the installer without it freezing. It just freezes over and over and over. I somehow managed to make it all the way through the installer and got to the Win10 desktop, and guess what it does. Freezes and makes me force power it down. I check msinfo32 and it was installed as UEFI and Secure boot was on, so it was right, but its unusable. I tried running startup repair and it said it couldn't fix it. I tried restoring to the restore partition, that didn't work. I tried installing the chipset drivers (mind you it took 3 or 4 tried because it just freezes) but even when that installed all the way, its still just freezing. I don't understand what the problem is. I also installed Samsung NVMe driver while in the desktop and that didn't stop anything either. 

 

This is ridiculous, its been 3 days now. I need this damn computer up and running, I literally can't afford for it to not be working. What would cause this to just keep freezing. 

[Droidbot]

RMA your board. Ask ASUS. They can help. 

Something's faulty here, 100%

[ShadowWolf810]

6 hours ago, Droidbot said:

RMA your board. Ask ASUS. They can help. 

Something's faulty here, 100%

I don't know if I even can RMA it, I think I've had it for over a year at this point. I also can't afford to just not have my computer for 3 weeks while I wait for a replacement even if I could get a different one...

[ShadowWolf810]

@DroidbotOmg I think I figured out what the problem was. So every time I have to force power down the system, it then takes 2 restarts to get back to the BIOS. You do it once, ASUS logo comes up, and then a big error message saying overclocking failed. It says you can go to BIOS to 'fix the problem' or whatever but I always just tap the power button, it shuts off, then on next restart I can actually go to the BIOS. Now I don't know if that's normal behavior but it got me thinking... the way that the mouse just freezes is a lot like what happens in actual overclocking failures. Checked the BIOS and my CPU wasn't running with an overclock because I had does ClearCMOS last night trying to fix everything, but I had set my Ram back to XMP just because I knew I never had to anything other than that and it went right to its rated speeds of 3000 MHz. Long story short, just took off XMP and I breezed through the install and have been on the desktop the entire time I typed this.... Maybe the new version of the BIOS I flashed changed the RAM and now it needs more voltage? I'm not 100% sure yet but I'm going to be pretty upset if I spent 3 days diagnosing a windows install problem when it was a Ram problem........ 

[Droidbot]

Just now, ShadowWolf810 said:

@DroidbotOmg I think I figured out what the problem was. So every time I have to force power down the system, it then takes 2 restarts to get back to the BIOS. You do it once, ASUS logo comes up, and then a big error message saying overclocking failed. It says you can go to BIOS to 'fix the problem' or whatever but I always just tap the power button, it shuts off, then on next restart I can actually go to the BIOS. Now I don't know if that's normal behavior but it got me thinking... the way that the mouse just freezes is a lot like what happens in actual overclocking failures. Checked the BIOS and my CPU wasn't running with an overclock because I had does ClearCMOS last night trying to fix everything, but I had set my Ram back to XMP just because I knew I never had to anything other than that and it went right to its rated speeds of 3000 MHz. Long story short, just took off XMP and I breezed through the install and have been on the desktop the entire time I typed this.... Maybe the new version of the BIOS I flashed changed the RAM and now it needs more voltage? I'm not 100% sure yet but I'm going to be pretty upset if I spent 3 days diagnosing a windows install problem when it was a Ram problem........ 

Maybe auto-XMP? Good job, glad you solved it. 

[ShadowWolf810]

6 hours ago, Droidbot said:

Maybe auto-XMP? Good job, glad you solved it. 

Yeahs, possible the most bitter sweet victory of all time.... I don't know, my BIOS gives me three options there, Auto (which is what is currently stable and I think it put the RAM at 2400), XMP (which is what I usually used and it would set it self to 3000 and the rest still said auto), and manual. 

[Windows7ge]

3 hours ago, ShadowWolf810 said:

Yeahs, possible the most bitter sweet victory of all time.... I don't know, my BIOS gives me three options there, Auto (which is what is currently stable and I think it put the RAM at 2400), XMP (which is what I usually used and it would set it self to 3000 and the rest still said auto), and manual. 

I know some motherboards will only allow the RAM speed to go up so high like 2400MHz, or 2666MHz, beyond that Auto-XMP sometimes will play with the FSB(Base Clock) to get it to higher frequencies (not always the case but it can happen)

 

I don't recall you mentioning any overclocking. Even though the RAM is rated for 3000MHz if the board starts it at 2133MHz or 2400MHz Enabling XMP or bringing it up manually is overclocking and should be the first thing you disable when experiencing freezes or BSOD...not to mention the board even told you Overclock Failure...should have started there.

[ShadowWolf810]

9 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

I know some motherboards will only allow the RAM speed to go up so high like 2400MHz, or 2666MHz, beyond that Auto-XMP sometimes will play with the FSB(Base Clock) to get it to higher frequencies (not always the case but it can happen)

 

I don't recall you mentioning any overclocking. Even though the RAM is rated for 3000MHz if the board starts it at 2133MHz or 2400MHz Enabling XMP or bringing it up manually is overclocking and should be the first thing you disable when experiencing freezes or BSOD...not to mention the board even told you Overclock Failure...should have started there.

Yup, hindsightes 20-20 haha. Believe me I know I should have realized it. My board changes the baseclock to 125 and multipliers down to 28 with XMP enabled. I just never put two and two together, because the ram was stable in all workloads at 3000 for months. I always just thought the overclock failure error was a quirk of my board because it only shows up when I force the power off. Even if there's no freeze of any kind and I just force the power off I get that error, so I never associated it with an actual overclocking failure. But I've also had these same unexplainable issues for months when trying to do reinstalls and things and just always had XMP on. Seems like its more tempermental during installs. Even when I'd do Clear CMOS I'd always just flip XMP back on to have it running at the right speed because I knew it was literally one button to change and I never had any issues with it. 

 

Looks like the saga is over though. Got some sleep, now I can reinstall all my stuff. Think I'm just gonna stick with Win 10 as much as it pains me to say it. Don't really want to have to do a completely new fresh install again in a few months when they stop supporting Win7, and getting real UEFI is nice. My PC would take well over a minute to boot, sometimes two. 

 

Can't fight progress I suppose. 

 

Thanks for all your help everybody, if it had been a problem with Windows I'm sure we would have found it! To be fair there were some issues with Win7 and Win10 not creating the partitions during the install correctly but that was fixed by unplugging all other drives! 

[Windows7ge]

@ShadowWolf810

That's what I thought. Something you also have to consider is overclocks can become unstable over time. If the BIOS don't give you the option to just set it to 3000MHz you can adjust the Base Clock to get that extra performance but you have to adjust voltages. You can do some research about which voltages will help stabilize a Base Clock overclock. I think one of them is CPUVTT. It supplies power to a specific part of your CPU which can help stabilize an increased FSB frequency.

[ShadowWolf810]

On 5/4/2017 at 8:21 AM, Windows7ge said:

@ShadowWolf810

That's what I thought. Something you also have to consider is overclocks can become unstable over time. If the BIOS don't give you the option to just set it to 3000MHz you can adjust the Base Clock to get that extra performance but you have to adjust voltages. You can do some research about which voltages will help stabilize a Base Clock overclock. I think one of them is CPUVTT. It supplies power to a specific part of your CPU which can help stabilize an increased FSB frequency.

Well the thing is that I never needed to adjust any voltages with XMP, when you switch it to that all the other options are still on auto so months ago I just turned on XMP and it automatically defaulted to 3000 MHz instead of like 2400 that the auto setting on the motherboard gives. And all I did was change that and it was 100% stable. Like the whole purpose of reinstalling was not necessary to fix any problems, just wanted to start fresh and make a clean image once I installed everything. I wasn't having any problems at all with stability during the months and months I was running XMP, so I don't think its an issue of the overclock becoming unstable, its like its unstable just during a windows install.

[Windows7ge]

@ShadowWolf810X99 chipset. I use an X99 platform but I don't use an m.2 SSD (I use a PCI_e SSD) so I can't give you my own experience trying to install onto a m.2 SSD on X99. I might convert to it in the future. I'm running low on space on my PCI_e SSD and it seems I can get similar if not better performance from the M.2 slot. I'd just have to check that I'm not using a PCI_e slot that shares the M.2 slot. Anyways back on topic I don't really know what else to tell you. We know this much though that the issue was RAM overclock related. Let me tell you. Your computer can do weird things when your ram is damaged or unstable. I've had websites refuse to load because of unstable ram overclocks. If it was fine for months then great. Why it doesn't like installing an OS when overclocked I don't know. Never experienced that issue.

 

Also to mention. When you plug very high speed RAM into a computer such as 3000MHz and your system only Auto clocks it up to 2400MHz (or whatever else) without manual override that is the max clock speed the board supports. It CAN go higher with overclocking. Enabling XMP or adjusting things manually can force the memory to reach its rated speed. Something you can do is enable XMP. Then go check the MHz speed. See if you return the base clock to 100 if the ram settings let you set it to 2933MHz (the intervals are 266MHz because they're DIMMs. 133MHz for SIMMs) this may help the issue in the future.