Clusterfuck - Bios and OS problems.
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!