msi laptop unexpectedly shuts down after reinstalling OS

Hi everyone, I hope i can find a few good suggestions here.

Let me begin by saying, this thread might be in the wrong section since i get a shut down, with no blue screen before. If so, please bear with me, i did have a look around for similar posts and the problem was similar but not identical.

Now, the situation: I have a msi GT 780 (DXR... not positive) laptop with 8 GB RAM on a windows 7, 64-bit Home Premium OS and an nVidia GPU with 1.5 GB RAM. (i can post the details later, but they might not be all that relevant). Recently i decided to split my RAID 0 hard drive in order to replace one of the two drives with an SSD. I installed the Win 7 OS on the SSD and pretty much everything else on the (freshly initiated and formatted) regular HDD. This worked well so far and i installed and updated all drivers i could think of. Performance has increased significantly, as was the idea behind the whole undertaking.

As usual, Windows spend several days installing several hundred updates, since unfortunately there is no bundled update in Windows update. Right now, there are no more updates available on Windows Update.

So, the issue i have: I play a game on the machine (through Steam, which is installed on the HDD), in yesterday's case Civilization 5, when out of nowhere my screen goes black and the machine switches off. No BSOD, no "shutting down" screen, just straight to "off".
Overheating was my first thought (although prior to the hard drive replacement this never happened) and i installed the msi Afterburner, a program to monitor GPU and memory activity and even log them.
So, while running Afterburner i recreated my steps, launched the game, and after abut 5 minutes again: black screen to shut down. I check the temperature logs: 72°C so overheating isn't the problem.
I rules out faulty RAM because that would usually lead to a BSOD, rather than a cold shut off, right? Also, in System Properties it is recognized as 8 GB (usable).
I reinstalled the GPU driver through nVidia Experience (had newest driver, which was uninstalled and replaced with the same version) and no change was observed. Still shuts down randomly.
Any reply i could get so far stated that it would likely be my power supply that is bowing out of life. This is something i can't rule out yet, but is it really just coincidence that i replace my HDD and while i do this, my power supply decides to die on me? seems an unlikely coincidence...
As a side note: I also played Assassins Creed 4 Black Flag without shutdowns... So, while it looks very much like a hardware failure, it isnt consistent, which makes me think there might be something else.

I would be very happy about any suggestions, that are not "overheating". Thank you in advance.

Hi there,

Just a few quick questions, is your power supply cutting out as well? (Does the charging light/AC Power light blink out?) If this is the case then it could be that running the game and everything else could be drawing too much power causing it to shutdown.

If this isn't the case then I would suggest its the game, you mentioned it didn't happen on AC Black Flag? Does it happen on any other games other than Civi 5? In this case the game is more than likely at fault and obviously affecting your laptop negatively.

What power mode is your laptop in? A long shot but it could be related to this? Stick it in performance mode and ramp up the CPU etc. to the same, don't forget the fans as well! (Can all be changed from advanced power settings).

A long time ago some games I played on early Win 7 required me to kill some processes in Task Manager. If you pop into TM and check out any unnecessary tasks that can be killed then kill them and try Civi 5 again?


Hope some of these may help you diagnose the problem and may even lead to a fix!

Keep us posted if you get somewhere.

M

i don't know where the power supply light would be found, if there is one. I will have a look over the weekend. I think it might be that i backed up the game folder for Civ5 before replacing the hard drive and some files might have been corrupted, but i did run the steam cache file consistency (or whatever the term is) and it didnt find any faults. I will check your points over the weekend and report back.

Thank you for your reply

What was the SATA controller setting changed to when you broke the RAID? It should be AHCI. Check in BIOS setup now.

Did you use the Win7 with SP1 latest official installer provided in Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7
and follow the other steps there to assure you get and keep a perfect install?

If so then work through the Troubleshooting Steps for Windows 7 starting with the hardware tests.

gregrocker said:

What was the SATA controller setting changed to when you broke the RAID? It should be AHCI. Check in BIOS setup now.

So i checked the BIOS and the setting was not AHCI. I changed it to AHCI which leads to thelaptop not booting up anymore. The moment it gets to the Wondows logo it BSODs out. Too quickly to see the BS error code.
ran memory diag aafter and found nothing.
Set it to RAID again and the system starts up fine.

Just had a quick loook around and it seems i need to reinstall windows after changing the setting to AHCI. Can you confirm this (before i start the reinstall id like to be sure)

You can change to without having to reinstall: AHCI : Enable in Windows 7 / Vista - Windows 7 Forums

I specifically asked you if you used the latest official installer and stuck closely to the same steps as in Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7 because if you did not then I would do it over to get it perfect.

I also suggested you test your hardware, too.

Troubleshooting these issues requires the utmost thoroughness, not just replying to the first step given and ignoring the others.