- Jun 5, 2014
- 10
- 0
- 4,510
hey guys, sorry if this is in the wrong section, I couldnt find a general help section, and since the most obvious of my symptoms appears on a screen, I figured I would dump this in here.
anyways, I will start with my hardware, and follow up with my symptoms. any help would be greatly appreciated.
Asus M5A97 LE R2.0
AMD FX-8350 8 core 4.0GHZ (with the stock radiator)
G.Skill Ares Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory
Seagate Barracuda 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive
MSI Radeon R9 270X 2GB TWIN FROZR Video Card
Corsair CX 750W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply
nzxt 530 case (if it matters)
I recently built a computer from the ground up (my first build, so Im still kinda new to this), and had it running smoothly for about 2 months. out of nowhere, one day my monitor just completely locks up. I have no mouse movement, no control alt delete, no BSOD, nothing... it just sits at whatever frame the computer locked up at until I do a hard restart. the first few times this happened, I was able to hard restart, and the computer would reboot right back into windows, only to lock up about 5 minutes later. my first thought was to check cpu temps (which consistently showed 45'C whenever I would lock). graphics temps looked to be ok as well (I dont remember exact temperatures, I just dont remember thinking it was high). after a few days of troubleshooting this, it would no longer reboot into windows, but instead lock up at the windows loading screen.
I tried to load up in safe mode, only to see that the computer consistently got locked up at "CLASSPNP.SYS", and would run at that point until it just shut itself off eventually.
my next step was a fresh install of windows. the computer booted up just fine on the fresh install (windows 7 ultimate 64bit to be specific), and could run for as long as its little processor desired, but as soon as I installed any kind of driver (I have been rotating my initial drivers [I have now reinstalled windows somewhere near 20 times, as some times it is my only way back into the system] to see if it seems to be one driver over the other, starting with my mobo drivers some times, graphics card drivers other times, and my network card once), I again had about 5 minutes (or even less if I was doing something really resource intensive, like... say... using the internet) to work with before the computer locked up again, and if I was lucky, it would let me reboot once.
so... things I have done to try to troubleshoot this...
first things first, I have run memtest to check the ram, it looks like it is just fine.
I have swapped in a brand new hard drive (western digital 2tb), only to have the exact same problem. (even I am not so unlucky that I would get back to back defective hard drives from seperate manufacturers).
I also ran the seagate drive checker on the initial hard drive, which returned that it was a good drive, but I read a few people saying that drive checkers are pretty unreliable, so I figured I would try replacing it, and worst comes to worst, I have an extra 2tb harddrive.
one thing that was particularly weird, was that when I was looking into possible hard drive problems, I decided to try to run boot and nuke through a bootable thumb drive to write the hard drive to zeros, just in case there was some kind of undetectable corruption in the drive. now to my (albeit limited) knowledge, if I am booting a program from a thumb drive that runs in linux, I should only be utilizing the mobo and ram to run the program, however I still managed to lock the screen up (although, after maybe 50 minutes rather than the normal 5).
I have reset the bios via my jumper pins, and have flashed it to the most recent bios version, with no success.
unfortunately, my mobo does not have onboard video capabilites, and I dont have access to another graphics card until tomorrow to test if it is the video card, although, I will say (confession bear time) that I bought the card used off ebay (GASP!!!, I know, I know... I just didnt know that was a no no at the time) so who knows what kind of fresh hell it was put through. aside from that, all parts are new.
I have installed windows from 2 different disks, just incase my original disk had somehow gotten messed up.
I have tried connecting to the internet through both wireless card, and through hard connection (I at one point in time thought it might have something to do with it since I always seemed to lock up while trying to look for drivers on the internet), but both seem to lock up.
Im pulling my hair out guys, I know the next step is probably to check the graphics card, but again, I cant really do that till tomorrow, and this is tearing at my sanity bit by bit. does anyone have any ideas as to what might be causing this???
thanks in advance, if you need any more information, Ill do my best to provide it, but again, I am only just getting into this whole computer building thing, and my knowledge is limited.
anyways, I will start with my hardware, and follow up with my symptoms. any help would be greatly appreciated.
Asus M5A97 LE R2.0
AMD FX-8350 8 core 4.0GHZ (with the stock radiator)
G.Skill Ares Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory
Seagate Barracuda 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive
MSI Radeon R9 270X 2GB TWIN FROZR Video Card
Corsair CX 750W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply
nzxt 530 case (if it matters)
I recently built a computer from the ground up (my first build, so Im still kinda new to this), and had it running smoothly for about 2 months. out of nowhere, one day my monitor just completely locks up. I have no mouse movement, no control alt delete, no BSOD, nothing... it just sits at whatever frame the computer locked up at until I do a hard restart. the first few times this happened, I was able to hard restart, and the computer would reboot right back into windows, only to lock up about 5 minutes later. my first thought was to check cpu temps (which consistently showed 45'C whenever I would lock). graphics temps looked to be ok as well (I dont remember exact temperatures, I just dont remember thinking it was high). after a few days of troubleshooting this, it would no longer reboot into windows, but instead lock up at the windows loading screen.
I tried to load up in safe mode, only to see that the computer consistently got locked up at "CLASSPNP.SYS", and would run at that point until it just shut itself off eventually.
my next step was a fresh install of windows. the computer booted up just fine on the fresh install (windows 7 ultimate 64bit to be specific), and could run for as long as its little processor desired, but as soon as I installed any kind of driver (I have been rotating my initial drivers [I have now reinstalled windows somewhere near 20 times, as some times it is my only way back into the system] to see if it seems to be one driver over the other, starting with my mobo drivers some times, graphics card drivers other times, and my network card once), I again had about 5 minutes (or even less if I was doing something really resource intensive, like... say... using the internet) to work with before the computer locked up again, and if I was lucky, it would let me reboot once.
so... things I have done to try to troubleshoot this...
first things first, I have run memtest to check the ram, it looks like it is just fine.
I have swapped in a brand new hard drive (western digital 2tb), only to have the exact same problem. (even I am not so unlucky that I would get back to back defective hard drives from seperate manufacturers).
I also ran the seagate drive checker on the initial hard drive, which returned that it was a good drive, but I read a few people saying that drive checkers are pretty unreliable, so I figured I would try replacing it, and worst comes to worst, I have an extra 2tb harddrive.
one thing that was particularly weird, was that when I was looking into possible hard drive problems, I decided to try to run boot and nuke through a bootable thumb drive to write the hard drive to zeros, just in case there was some kind of undetectable corruption in the drive. now to my (albeit limited) knowledge, if I am booting a program from a thumb drive that runs in linux, I should only be utilizing the mobo and ram to run the program, however I still managed to lock the screen up (although, after maybe 50 minutes rather than the normal 5).
I have reset the bios via my jumper pins, and have flashed it to the most recent bios version, with no success.
unfortunately, my mobo does not have onboard video capabilites, and I dont have access to another graphics card until tomorrow to test if it is the video card, although, I will say (confession bear time) that I bought the card used off ebay (GASP!!!, I know, I know... I just didnt know that was a no no at the time) so who knows what kind of fresh hell it was put through. aside from that, all parts are new.
I have installed windows from 2 different disks, just incase my original disk had somehow gotten messed up.
I have tried connecting to the internet through both wireless card, and through hard connection (I at one point in time thought it might have something to do with it since I always seemed to lock up while trying to look for drivers on the internet), but both seem to lock up.
Im pulling my hair out guys, I know the next step is probably to check the graphics card, but again, I cant really do that till tomorrow, and this is tearing at my sanity bit by bit. does anyone have any ideas as to what might be causing this???
thanks in advance, if you need any more information, Ill do my best to provide it, but again, I am only just getting into this whole computer building thing, and my knowledge is limited.
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