Hi bit-tech! I require assistance with my PC which will soon be 3 years old (10th May 2011 is its birthday!) and I'm hoping to salvage what I can and fix any problems before having to replace any parts. System Specs OS = Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 CPU = i5 2500k unlocked @ 3.33gHz GPU = nVidia GTX650 HDD = Crucial M4 SSD 64GB (boot drive) + Samsung 1TB storage drive Motherboard = Asus Sabertooth P67 RAM = 8GB DDR3 1600mHz Sound Card = Xonar Essence STX PSU = Corsair HX650W Case = Fractal R3 Problem Symptoms Okay, there are many symptoms so bare with me as I try to describe them all as best as I can. The first problem is that the PC will randomly crash by completely freezing with a loud noise coming from any speakers/headphones. It remains in this state until the power is cut and doesn't respond at all. From what I can tell, it most commonly enters this state when playing a video of any kind- youtube and streams are what I am normally watching (twitch and netflix). However, it has crashed before when viewing forums (I was typing this thread out when it crashed there and then). The noise that can be heard is a sort of buzzing/static mixture (very unpleasant). On occasion, if a video was being played, a very brief amount of the audio from the video will loop and be mixed into the static. When browsing this forum and having the PC crash, very briefly the bottom half of the screen turned completely white, before turning yellow, before correcting itself to what it should appear to be (all whilst the system had crashed and was making the noise and not responding). The second problem is that if the power is cut from the PC, my SSD drive will not be accessible upon powering up the system again, leading to me being unable to reboot the system. This is particularly annoying as every time the PC crashes, the PC can't reboot as the SSD is inaccessible: Status: 0xc000000e Info: The boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible. After doing several "power cycles" (turning it off and back on again about 10 times) eventually the SSD starts functioning and the system can boot up for as long as it remains until it inevitably crashes again and the cycle continues once more. Attempted Solutions Full driver sweep and update for GPU & BIOS- UNSUCCESSFUL Windows Repair Tool- UNSUCCESSFUL; does not see a problem when the SSD is functioning and cannot repair the SSD when it is not functioning after a crash SSD Firmware Update- CANNOT BE COMPLETED; the update says a file is missing called \grldr.mbr ; require assistance as Windows Repair Tool does not see this issue Removing all overclocks- UNSUCCESSFUL Memtest- UNSUCCESSFUL; ran 2 passes and no errors were found Fresh Windows Installation- UNSUCCESSFUL; still crashes after reinstalling Windows I hope you guys can help me either fix this problem here and now or at least point out which of my devices could be faulty so that I can replace them with upgrades. The PC is 3 years old now and it is almost time that I begin to upgrade parts- I was thinking about trying a water-cooled system- but I'm hoping I can make this last another year or so before having to do that! I will try to be as helpful as possible and hope I've included enough information already in this thread for you to help me. If not, let me know and I'll answer any queries you have PROBLEM SOLVED!! The motherboard was the issue. I replaced it with another and the PC hasn't crashed ever since!
Sounds like issue is that your bootfiles is not on the ssd but probably on your hdd. I would take the ssd and perform an ata secure erase on it then use DOS version firmware updater. I would do a clean install, with the hdd disconnected completely to ensure it is installed properly. I would also ensure it's setting up on GPT type disk if you did not previously. Use rufus to prepare your usb stick for Windows GPT type installation. This should also eliminate any os corruption as the cause of the crashing. Start over with the most recent drivers from intel, nvidia and asus for everything.
Would the boot files not being on the SSD also cause the system to crash randomly all of a sudden? Also... I won't lie but I have little understanding of what you just said. I'm a noob with PC stuff Lots of google searches to do now! Can you think of any other causes that I could also potentially look into?
The initial crashing is probably being caused by gpu or audio driver as they are more often than not. You can use something like bluescreenview to check into the minidump files that get generated when crash occurs, go through entries in evenviewer as well as they can also help to narrow down the cause. I still think starting fresh is a good idea anyway as it will need to be done to solve the other problem unless you want to do bcd rebuild.
I did do a clean sweep of the GPU driver but that didn't solve the issue. I didn't try the Audio driver though, so I'll try that out the next time I have a moment to try more things. The crashes aren't blue screen crashes though. The computer literally locks into place with whatever was on the screen and cannot do anything else until the power is cut, so no idea if any dump files would be created. What do you think? I'll look into eventviewer too
I'd try turning off any overclocks too, just to make sure that's not causing issues with something. I had crashing problems once when trying to install DirectX a few years back, everything else worked fine and was 100% stable, but as soon as I tried to install DX it failed. Turned off the OC, and it worked fine, then put the OC back on afterwards and had no problems.
Turn off your overclock. Almost certain that is your problem. You are experiencing a hardware failure. Try it before you do anything else, since troubleshooting with an overclock is not a good idea.
I've checked to see if I had any overclocks. My CPU hadn't been overclocked. My GPU had an overclock at one point using EVGA Precision, but I took the overclock off. The PC still crashes with no overclocks. See above. Even with no overclocks (from what I can tell), the PC will still crash.
Tried memtest, no problems with the RAM. Tried reinstalling Windows, still crashed after some time. Anybody got any advice?
