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General discussion

System Boot troubles

Oct 25, 2018 12:33AM PDT

I am running an asus z170m-e d3, intel i5-6600k, evga gtx 970.
while running CSGO my screen froze, the screen went black and a message saying overclock failure appeared. From that time on I have been unable to boot into windows but have been able to load the bios. After reading some forums it seemed likely that the cpu was at fault. I purchased a factory new intel i5-7500 to replace the chip with and after updating the bios I was able to boot back into the bios. unfortunately I came to the same problem where it will not boot windows, attempts to run system repair but eventually says unknown error. What could be at fault? Have I ruled out the cpu as the issue?

Discussion is locked

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Re: boot troubles
Oct 25, 2018 12:46AM PDT

If system repair fails, the next step is a refresh, reset or clean install. If the clean install fails on hardware that used to run Windows without issues, it's a hardware issue.

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Actually
Oct 25, 2018 9:57AM PDT

I've encountered a few where it was the GPU. After that is was the PSU, then motherboard.

But you must do the tests that Kees listed first.

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Lost
Oct 25, 2018 2:24PM PDT

I have tried removing the GPU all together and still no boot, would that rule out the GPU as the problem? Will refresh soon

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Re: GPU
Oct 25, 2018 2:56PM PDT

I don't think Windows uses the GPU when doing the (failing) repair, so that made the GPU as a cause already very unlikely. But you could have test by booting into Safe Mode (requires a disk or stick or the recovery drive you made in Windows 10).

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Keep making it smaller.
Oct 25, 2018 3:02PM PDT

That whatever the failure is has corrupted the HDD contents. For this reason I remove the HDD and put it aside till we get the machine working. So we don't need the GPU or the HDD as we can boot from any USB based OS or the W10 install and repair USB stick.

It's now a matter of downsizing till it works. Then we can put our old HDD back in and trying a boot from that drive.

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smaller?
Oct 25, 2018 5:53PM PDT

So to make it smaller you mean that I should be removing parts that are not necessary to boot?

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That's the usual method.
Oct 25, 2018 9:01PM PDT

Since most owners don't backup we usually pull the HDD and SSDs out since we want to get down to what's broken without risk of wiping their data. This may be hard on folk new to PC troubleshooting but we don't need the user's drives. We pop in a fresh one or run off USB sticks until we think we've found the trouble.