Hello all,
I am attempting to fix my cousin's computer and having some trouble with it, here is a quick rundown on what happened:
He was blowing out his tower and decided to reseat the CPU after he noticed the heatsink had a bunch of dust in it- when he was removing the heatsink the CPU came out with it. According to him the two were "fused together". He applied some Arcticlean #1 and eventually got the CPU to come off...and then he promptly dropped it from about 4 feet to his tile floor.
He called me to help him after he noticed the CPU had a bunch of bent pins. I managed to straighten the pins out and install it back into its socket with no trouble- the only visible damage was a tiny chip on the corner of the silicon. I applied some Arctic Silver 5 and installed the heatsink. When we turned the rig on it started up and the BIOS posted to a screen that said "new CPU installed, press enter to set up". We pressed enter then the BIOS came up. Looking good so far! After that we exited the BIOS and reset the PC.
This is when the mystery began.
It would boot up, go to the Windows 7 welcome screen (he has no password so it auto forwards him to his desktop)- when it came time to show the desktop the computer just restarted. We tried this a couple different times and it always did the same thing. One time we managed to get into safe mode so I ran a CHKDSK and it repaired a bunch of stuff. Tried restarting- still the same issue. After that we tried startup repair- to no avail. During this time period the PC kept restarting at different intervals, not always at the windows loading/welcome screen.
At this point I decided (maybe naively so) that the system files might be corrupted- this was a computer he only recently bought from a friend so we decided to get what we could off of the HD and do a clean install of Windows 7- hoping that would correct the issue.
I used a live CD (Hirem's w/ mini XP) and the PC booted up fine- didn't restart at all. We grabbed what little data he had and checked the system information just in case the CPU was damaged and running hot- NOPE! Running around 39-45C Nothing was abnormally hot.
So we boot from the Windows 7 disk and go to do a clean install. It works fine initially but then freezes when it gets to Expanding Files 46%- I restarted the computer and tried again but this time it will not let me do a clean install. We decided to erase the HD and start from scratch- it gets stuck again at 46%. I ran home and grabbed a spare blank HD I had, tried that one too and AGAIN it got stuck.
We scanned the original hard drive and it shows 465GB as the size when it is really 500GB, the scan reported bad sectors...not sure if that would affect anything.
At this point we are really unsure what to do next, we don't know if the HD is messed up, if it is the CPU from being dropped or the Mobo.
Any help/sage advice would be REALLY appreciated!
System specs:
Mobo:
Asus 990FX Sabertooth
CPU:
AMD FX-8350 8-Core processor
Ram:
2x4 GB DDR3 (forget the brand)
HD:
WDC Velociraptor 500GB
Video Card:
NVIDIA GT-520
I am attempting to fix my cousin's computer and having some trouble with it, here is a quick rundown on what happened:
He was blowing out his tower and decided to reseat the CPU after he noticed the heatsink had a bunch of dust in it- when he was removing the heatsink the CPU came out with it. According to him the two were "fused together". He applied some Arcticlean #1 and eventually got the CPU to come off...and then he promptly dropped it from about 4 feet to his tile floor.
He called me to help him after he noticed the CPU had a bunch of bent pins. I managed to straighten the pins out and install it back into its socket with no trouble- the only visible damage was a tiny chip on the corner of the silicon. I applied some Arctic Silver 5 and installed the heatsink. When we turned the rig on it started up and the BIOS posted to a screen that said "new CPU installed, press enter to set up". We pressed enter then the BIOS came up. Looking good so far! After that we exited the BIOS and reset the PC.
This is when the mystery began.
It would boot up, go to the Windows 7 welcome screen (he has no password so it auto forwards him to his desktop)- when it came time to show the desktop the computer just restarted. We tried this a couple different times and it always did the same thing. One time we managed to get into safe mode so I ran a CHKDSK and it repaired a bunch of stuff. Tried restarting- still the same issue. After that we tried startup repair- to no avail. During this time period the PC kept restarting at different intervals, not always at the windows loading/welcome screen.
At this point I decided (maybe naively so) that the system files might be corrupted- this was a computer he only recently bought from a friend so we decided to get what we could off of the HD and do a clean install of Windows 7- hoping that would correct the issue.
I used a live CD (Hirem's w/ mini XP) and the PC booted up fine- didn't restart at all. We grabbed what little data he had and checked the system information just in case the CPU was damaged and running hot- NOPE! Running around 39-45C Nothing was abnormally hot.
So we boot from the Windows 7 disk and go to do a clean install. It works fine initially but then freezes when it gets to Expanding Files 46%- I restarted the computer and tried again but this time it will not let me do a clean install. We decided to erase the HD and start from scratch- it gets stuck again at 46%. I ran home and grabbed a spare blank HD I had, tried that one too and AGAIN it got stuck.
We scanned the original hard drive and it shows 465GB as the size when it is really 500GB, the scan reported bad sectors...not sure if that would affect anything.
At this point we are really unsure what to do next, we don't know if the HD is messed up, if it is the CPU from being dropped or the Mobo.
Any help/sage advice would be REALLY appreciated!
System specs:
Mobo:
Asus 990FX Sabertooth
CPU:
AMD FX-8350 8-Core processor
Ram:
2x4 GB DDR3 (forget the brand)
HD:
WDC Velociraptor 500GB
Video Card:
NVIDIA GT-520
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