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#1
Total system crashes -- possibly hardware (south bridge) related?
Hi guys, I need a little help diagnosing a weird problem. It began when I noticed that my mouse and keyboard weren't being recognized by the BIOS during bootup -- but, oddly enough, they were recognized and worked fine once Windows booted. I tried a couple of things, ended up reflashing the BIOS, but no dice. Finally I figured out that I happened to have both the KB and mouse plugged into USB3.0 slots in the back of the computer. When I plugged them into normal USB slots, they were recognized fine by the BIOS.
Now, I'm having random crashes. I came to my computer a couple of days ago and it had apparently crashed and rebooted, telling me something along the lines of "please insert valid boot media." I was terrified that my hard drive fried, so I tried rebooting again, and this time it worked perfectly. And ran for a couple of hours before I got a frozen screen for a couple of minutes (it looked like a standard "firefox locked up" situation), followed by this screen popping up: https://i.imgur.com/vbOuo.jpg for a couple of seconds before the computer crashed and rebooted again.
So far, I've reflashed the BIOS and run Windows' simple boot-disk "repair errors" diagnostic. Neither helped. I'm leaning towards this having something to do with a bad southbridge, but I didn't want to run out and buy a new mobo until I know it's the problem. As far as I know, it could be a bad video card, I've had weird pieces of hardware cause weird problems in the past. Is there any advice any of you can give for how to go about figuring this out?