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      10-21-2018, 08:41 PM   #1
bosstones
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Help Needed: PC Problem/Question

So, I built a new rig towards the end of last year and all has been well until recently. I know my machine has rebooted a few times while I was away (I come back and the PC is at login/lock screen but all my windows are closed when I log in) but figured it was a Windows patch/reboot. This was not a common thing but happened a few times spread out over along period of time.

It locked up the other day while playing music and printing out an e-mail.....something that shouldn't be taxing for an i7700k w/ 16GB of RAM. I was able to boot into safe mode once after that but ever since then I haven't been able to boot to anything. Not to Windows, not safe mode, not off the windows CD/DVD, and not off the recovery thumbdrive I made. It locks up at different states after POST. It might bsod or just sit there mocking me w/ the windows logo up but frozen nonetheless (sometimes the stupid dot circle status thing comes up but then locks). I created a thumbdrive to run memtest86 but it locks up early on every time and never gets very far into memtest.

I originally thought maybe windows fubar'd itself w/ the last update/patch but I should still be able to boot from a recovery disk/thumbdrive. I've tried removing one of the 2 sticks of RAM and trying them one at a time as well as swapping what slots were used.

If I put a blank drive and try to boot from it, I correctly get an error that there's no OS to boot from. Also, the PC always passes POST.

Given the randomness of how far the PC gets w/ booting from anything, I figured maybe something was overheating but I get no alarm and, at idle, the CPU temp reported by the BIOS (and memtest) seems to be in a normal range (37-45C) and I don't hear the fans spool up ever (unless I manually set ramp them up when playing in the bios). I've run UEFI at default settings and even flashed the latest BIOS but no joy.

I'm guessing there is a HW issue that the prior reboots were symptomatic of, but I'm stumped on this one. I've been building my own rigs for a long time and never ran into this much trouble. Anyone have any idea on what to try?

For record, even w/ an unlocked proc, I do not overclock. I also have the same lock issue in the current HW state which is barebones....no peripherals, no GPU (I'm using the on-board graphics chip).....only have the PSU, MB, proc, 2 sticks of RAM, 1 SSD (new/blank), and 1 ROM drive.

I have replacement parts and will basically play swaptronics at this point.
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