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
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strange stop error destroys hdd mobo post