Yo Ho!

First of all, long time no post I know - my life is a little different now to what it has been over the past decade. Hope you all are doing well, I did add a few of you on steam recently under the name Smeep, so maybe we can eventually catch up on there.

Right then down to the nitty gritty, as you've probably seen on here before when I post for tech help I also use these pages as sort of a journal for what I've tried.

The System:

AMD Phenom II
Windows 8.1 Pro 64bit
750GB Sata HDD
GeForce 660GTX
8GB Ram

Is all I can remember at the moment, I'll post more if I get a succesful boot again...

The problems:

1. Windows crashed whilst playing Roller Coaster Tycoon, thanks to a known issue with Water Flickering. However, upon reboot it came up with "Preparing Automatic Repair." The small circle of moving dots does about a 3rd of a rotation before freezing, only way forward is to power down.

2. Sometimes, windows gets a little further, gets to the Blue Windows splash screen, the little dots appear then freeze, then need to reboot.

3. Sometimes, I get to the log in screen, it freezes, need to reboot.

4. Sometimes I get in to the operating system, desktop loads and I can use it for 15-30 minutes before it eventually dies - but if it dies here it just black screens and reboots.

At this point, I figure I need to get in to bios and use a recovery drive (which I made on the laptop I'm using now) to repair/rollback whichever, which leads me in to...

5. BIOS is non-responsive. The only key that doesn't cause the PC to crash is "F1" to try again if I cause a bios crash the first time around. I can't access boot menu, can't access bios, if I press tab to display the bios message (mobo has a custom splash screen) then it freezes to. DEL is setup, that freezes, F8 is boot menu, that freezes.

The last thing I did before the computer froze up completely was update the graphics card driver (attempting to fix the graphical issues in RCT3) and update my antivirus software. I also configured the RCT3 profile on the graphics card to use V-synch.

Things I have tried so far:

1. Rebooting, several times.
2. Attempted to boot from USB to repair the PC (Can't due to bios crash)
3. Attempted to refresh windows from within the operating system, couldn't because at the time I didn't have the boot media. Which I'm now frantically rebooting to try and get back in to the OS to try again, now that I have said boot media.
4. Clearing CMOS using my Clear CMOS button
5. Clearing BIOS by removing battery and removing cord for 10 minutes. (I'm heading out soon, I'm going to leave it off for the duration.)
6. Removing sound card in case there is a conflict between that and on-board.

Anyways, all of this to no avail. I did manage to get it to the screen that allows 8.1 to boot in safe mode once, but open choosing an option there it crashed again.

Things I've yet to try, but will
Remove all non essentials (Though, after taking out sound card, all I have left to do is drop it to 1 stick of ram.)
Format - but that's where I'm headed, assuming that I can get BIOS to respond or get in to PC at all.


Other that, this build has been fine for months. No blue screens, no crashing, which leads me to think software - but you guys may know better. Surely enough I'm pricing a new build anyway, but at only the CPU, HDD, Cooler and Heatsink, I'm at £600+ (planning to use old parts from this machine and slowly upgrade.)

As always any help is appreciated and even if it is about tech help It'll be good to hear from you all again

Cheers!

Read your post. Don't have time to answer for now, will try to give some thoughts later or tomorrow (saturday).

Sunday and still no reply. Tsk tsk Peltz.

Sadly, I am at a loss Mole. I hope you can fix it though. It sounds pretty bad though.

Sounds like a motherboard / power supply / ram issue. None of the other components should influence the ability to enter Bios. Something could have happened with the cpu but their failure rate is so low that I highly doubt it. Hopefully you have a friend or parents whose pc you can raid for parts because i don't see how you will be able to track down the faulty piece without some trial and error.

You might consider getting some second hand parts and then reselling them as soon as you are done.

All of the parts are relatively new, but they are hand me downs so I guess that means nothing really.

I've put a new bios battery in, tried booting with only 1 RAM stick.

i tried flashing the bios last time I got to windows too, but it kicked back an EEPROM error.

Time to upgrade I think.

EDIT:

It's sort of booting. Down to one stick of ram, though this didn't insta fix it... managed to flash the bios and install the new one. Well reinstall...

But I still can't consistently access BIOS and when I do it is none responsive.

Doesn't sound good. I'd personally lean toward the issue being your motherboard, though as Peltz notes, it could really be any of your core hardware. I know this is late and you're looking at building a new box, so there may not be much of a point to troubeshooting. If I were faced by a similar situation, I'd definitely just build a new computer, but I have more disposable income than patience nowadays.

I'm thinking either Mobo or PSU, but the PSU is brand new...

As I am building a new rig, I may try to fix this on in an old case and flog it.

It might be your PSU, but I seriously doubt it. That usually results in either shit burning or the machine shutting down and not powering back up again. But you never know. Shiny's graphics card recently friend, so now she's running a GTX 970. Which is the card I wish I had.

At the moment, the old rig is running and hasn't blue screened in 5 days. (Permanent uptime.)

It restarts ok, the only thing I can't do now is get it to go in to the BIOS. Something on the Mobo has had it. Might just format/whitespace the HDD, and sell the rig.