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#1
Repeating issues and BSODs on a 5 year old pc with replaced parts
Hey guys, my brother bought his pc about 5-6 years ago (Gainward GTX560 GS, x4 955 cpu, 4x2gigs of 2 different Gskill 1333mhz sets of ram, 120gb Samsung evo 840, 1tb WD 7200 rpm hdd, Asrock 870 extreme 3 mobo)
And after a few months, or within the first year, the pc started having issues, BSOD's in games (different ones, not only one), tested the ram and it was bad, returned it, got new ram, fixed the issues for a while. A while after, they returned, thought it might be the old Palit gtx560 gfx card, as it always showed graphic drivers crashing (and rarely BSOD's) in Minecraft, Smite, Skyrim and pretty much everything he played. And the temperatures were all quite low, barely ever reaching 70 degrees celsius, even in games, it was very stable temperature-wise.
After a while, we thought it could be a PSU issue, so we replaced it as well, I got a new GPU for my pc, so I let him have my Gainward GTX560 GS, but the issues continued.
The BSOD's always said it was a sort of a memory issue, thinking it's the ram all over again, I memtested all four modules without a single error in 8 hours of runtime, inspected the PC and saw that my brother placed them incorrectly - the 2 different types were paired up, thinking how that might've been the issue, i've replaced them from a 1 1 2 2 position to a 1 2 1 2 position, so they end up paired. This ended up causing even more issues, the pc started bluescreening when booting, wouldnt boot at all showing there's no bootable device, saying that a recent hardware or software change might've done it.
So I went ahead and tested the modules by their sets (2 red ones and 2 black ones) and that has accomplished literally nothing, cause it kept crashing no matter which ones were in, which would mean that either all four of them are broken, or that neither of them are (way more likely).
After a while of research and some long unslept nights, I've reached a conclusion that it could likely be either the SSD gone bad, or the mobo, which was very likely. I've still taken precausions by testing both the 1 tb WD HDD and the Samsung Evo SSD for bad sectors, twice! The results were clear, not a single bad sector or error was found there.
There was nothing left to do other than try a new mobo, so we've decided for an Asrock 970 Pro 3 since it was the only one in stock.
Plugged it in today, plugged in everything properly and turned on the pc, which showed a "Bootmgr is missing" error, restarted the pc and had a white blinking dash on top of the screen only, googled around, fiddled around BIOS, found that the SATA controller was disabled for the SSD, turned it on, installed windows in the SSD, when starting up it showed a quick glimpse of a blue screen with memory dump info, then got to a screen saying I can either "fix windows installation" or start normally, tried to start normally, got another BSOD with a ntfs.sys error, and another which indicated SSD failure, replaced the SSD with a HDD I had left from dad's laptop. Tried to install windows on that, when I got an error when loading the Windows dvd (right after the "windows is loading files" screen) with various .sys errors.
Unplugged the DVD drive and tried to sort it through a USB bootable Windows installation, which had led to the very same issue, a BSOD right after windows setup loaded files (Hidclass.sys this time). I've tried to do it with each ram module separately, no use.
If anyone would have a single clue what might be wrong in my bro's pc, I'd be very, very grateful, as we've replaced the GPU, mobo, ram, ssd (temporarily), PSU so far and nothing seemed to work, the only thing we haven't replaced yet is the CPU, but after a 6 hours torture test, it showed no signs of being broken, or even malfunctioning.
Unfortunately, I cannot supply you guys with the latest BSOD's as the pc is inoperable at the moment, but I do have those from before we grabbed the new mobo, which were from times when we switched around the rams to check them out, and before we fiddled with anything in the pc.
Excuse me for not fitting the whole BSOD section completely, but this issue is a crossover issue between BSODs and hardware, and I wasn't sure where to post it . Thanks a lot anyways!