Windows crashes on startup only when powering on system

You mentioned something buzzing, which is never good. It could be your PSU, DVD, or some fan hanging.

It doesn't seem to buzz too much now, but I noticed when looking inside that one of the case's fans was spinning close to its molex power cord. I pulled it away. I think that might have been what the buzzing was.

Go into Bios and reset to factory setting, except what you need for your RAID array.

Everything was at factory settings, default voltages and all, I mean. The only thing I changed, and this was yesterday, was the voltages for the RAM, since they somehow got too high. Should I reset everything anyway?

If you got your RAM as 2 4GB kits, you may have mixed the stick up and the matched ones are separated. It would seem that some RAM or a slot is bad.

That could be. When my motherboard stopped functioning, I tried putting my RAM into his machine to test if they failed. Hopefully I didn't, but I could have mixed one of my sticks in with his. It may be the RAM slot, but since I still get the Windows logo auto-restarting even with one stick in the first slot, I thought of trying to just leave a stick in the suspected bad slot. Would it do any harm to use the other two slots instead of the first two? Right now I'm using A1 and B1. I could test the other two and see if it is the slot or not. It could just be the OS having problems now, at this point, for all I know, since the BSODs seemed to have calmed down, and now Windows just hangs up/freezes without crashes.

However, I had no idea you could have "mismatched" sticks, even when the two packs are identical. That's a new thing for me to learn. It's possible that I might have done that, since I was ignorant of that fact.

With sooo many different bug check errors this is quite confusing. Note that I have no RAID experience and I won't try to speak to those issues. But, on my gigabyte board to use RAID I would have to use specific SATA headers.

Believe me, I know, there could be any number of things wrong with this machine. I knew the BSODs weren't much of a help anymore since they seemed so random, and didn't really tell anything. I knew I had to start taking the thing apart to really know what was wrong with it. Yes, on the Asus mobo RAID is in specific SATA ports, and I have the HDDs in the appropriate SATA ports for RAID.

Try this. Go into bios and load optimized defaults. Then change the ram voltage to 1.5, then set your sata controllers to raid like you have them. Reboot and post screenshots of CPUz again. Trust me. No phenomII CPU can run ram at 1600 without several tweeks. The highest the chip will run on default settings is 1333 with timings of 9-9-9-24. Some setting is out of whack in bios to have the ram running at that speed. And also set your boot order

I admit that I'm pretty curious myself about how that happened, since I never adjusted anything. I was sort of busy today so I didn't get a chance to work on the computer, that and I was asked to take a "break" because I was working on it all day yesterday and was pretty aggressive about not stopping until it was fixed, lol.

When you have tried essenbe's BIOS treatment, I think that you should try the startup repair or even a new install. If these do not fix the problem I think we can safely say it is the MB or the RAM at fault and we can then concentrate on finding out which.

I'll do this as well, probably all of it tomorrow while I've got time to myself.

Also, does the graphical glitch with that one RAM stick in mean it's no good? I'm leaning toward "yes" since I've never seen that happen with RAM before, and it's the only stick that does it when in a slot, either the first or second. I just need to know if I should RMA it while I'm still waiting on my motherboard replacement as well.

Oh, I see, gotcha. Okay, I'll remember that.

Can you confirm this is your RAM?
[ Ripjaws ] F3-12800CL9S-2GBRL (2Gx1) / F3-12800CL9D-4GBRL (2Gx2) / F3-12800CL9Q-8GBRL (2Gx4)
It does list the Asus M4A89TD Pro motherboard in the Qualified Motherboard list, this is close enough to yours to indicate there should be no compatibility issues.

Yes, that is my RAM.

There is a known issue with running RAM above 1333MHz on AMD CPUs, here is a link explaining the issues.

VERY IMPORTANT INFORMATION REGARDING AMD AM3 CPU's and RAM SPEEDS

Q&A for the topic VERY IMPORTANT INFORMATION REGARDING AMD AM3 CPU's & RAM....

This is affecting all motherboards and all types of RAM.

I read the articles, and they helped inform me a lot, since I had no idea of these issues. I wish I had before I built these, because now I'm fearing that I might have damaged the memory on both of our machines because of this. He and I both had the latest BIOS and I think since he got the latest BIOS, he's had problems. I had no idea that all this time, the RAM was set to the wrong voltage and could cause this kind of damage to the CPU. I'm now beginning to believe that since our machines were identical, it wasn't my motherboard that failed; maybe it was my CPU.

My biggest concern now is that it's too late to save his machine. I'm worried that he may need a replacement CPU, and if it's damaged because of this odd issue with the BIOS, they may not replace it. Buying a new one would hurt our finances. Hell, buying two would even worse.

The reason I say that is

The 1600 MHz frequency setting is causing your BSoDs and failure to boot.

His system is still failing to boot properly after I changed the voltage down to 1.5v instead of 1.6 where it was at. The BSODs stopped chain spamming now, but the Windows logon screen still hangs and freezes. Unless damaged RAM can cause damage to the OS and can be fixed via startup repair, but I'm actually thinking that may not be the case. I'm crossing my fingers, but I think his system might be damaged now, and I think that's the reason why my machine failed, too. In short, this is terribly bad news.

Have you ran memtest86+ as per this tutorial?

I ran Memtest on each individual stick one at a time, several passes with no errors, I think about 6 each. I haven't done a full 6 passes with both sticks at once. I could try that, too.

I do have the RAM in A1 and B1.

That's all I know for now. Thanks for the info so far and I'll keep you posted if I change anything further, likely tomorrow.