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Strange Stop Error Destroys HDD, now MOBO won't POST

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  • Stop Error
  • Hard Drives
  • Motherboards
Last response: in Motherboards
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June 10, 2013 7:37:43 AM

Hi all, here’s my story of the PC build from hell over the last two weeks—my third, and probably last build before I break down and buy a Mac.

At first, I attempted a Win7 Ultimate install on a 60GB SDD, with simlinks to a User Directory on a 1 TB HDD. This was done with the hope of improving boot time and OS performance. After some OS instability and stop errors, I came to the conclusion that MS probably did not support this configuration. I removed the SDD, wiped the HDD with DBAN as a precaution and reinstalled the OS on the HDD. Again, OS instability and stop errors, which after running SFC and various memory and stress tests on the hardware I chalked up to corruption in Windows. I reseated the memory and graphics card, borrowed a clean Win7 Ultimate disk from a friend, and tried installing again on the HDD. With each install, I updated chipset and video drivers, and Motherboard temps were always in the 40 C range, while Processor temps were in the 50-60 C range.

Third time’s the charm, right? Wrong. After fully installing and updating Win7 on the HDD, I watched a vid on Youtube to pass a few minutes while Office 2003 was installing. Sure enough: stop error again, only this time on reboot: Windows was missing hardware required for reboot. I inserted the clean system disk, only to find that my 1 TB partition was reduced to around 200 GB (!), and Windows could not install. Tried again with my old XP disc, only to receive stop errors after “Windows is starting” message during the Windows setup screen. Attempting to boot to DBAN resulted in a failure to read the hard drive.

After powering down and reseating memory and graphics card again, (drumroll please) no POST on startup. My question is: is the MOBO the culprit in all of this, and is my CPU, memory and HDD now also fried and useless? Unfortunately I do not have the stop error codes, but my specs are below.

ASUS M5A97 R2.0 Socket AM3+ ATX Motherboard
AMD FX 8320 Black Ed. 3.5 GHz AM3+ 8 Core 8 Thread Processor
EVGA GeForce GT640 2048 MB PCI-E Video Card
ADATA 8 GB DDR 3-1333 PC3-10600 Memory
Inland Gold Series 500w Power supply

More about : strange stop error destroys hdd mobo post

a b V Motherboard
June 10, 2013 7:49:14 AM

A similar problem happened with a friends computer once and after many hdd replacements we finally were able to find out that the PSU was faults. So you should try that too.
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June 10, 2013 9:31:29 AM

Xttony said:
A similar problem happened with a friends computer once and after many hdd replacements we finally were able to find out that the PSU was faults. So you should try that too.


Thanks for the quick reply! Was a surge at fault? Was your friend's mobo/processor/memory/video cards junked by this, or just his hdd's?
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a b V Motherboard
June 11, 2013 1:07:35 AM

Just the HDDs cause the motherboard protects the CPU and RAM from these surges, and the GPU has a similar protection module of its own which can protect it from minor surges. HDD has very less to no protection. High surges can damage mobo, CPU and GPU. And if your motherboard is damaged it will create this type of problem too.

First change your PSU, if that doesn't help only then try this on a different motherboard. You may also wanna check your current hard drives on a another system. But don't try another HDD on your system without changing the PSU.

Remember Your faulty PSU can/will keep on damaging your components but a faulty HDD won't damage anything, so try out your HDD on another computer.
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