PC s**t the bed.

[SneakySnake]

Last night got home at about 12:20 to play diablo 3. My optical drive wasn't hooked up, so I hooked it up while my computer was still running (I know, stupid, but i wanted to get diablo going asap, it was a rookie move)

Anyways. upon turning my screen on after installing my ODD. I saw the blue screen of death. That had never happened before, but I wasn't worried, so I hit the reset button, and then windows took about 10 tries to boot, and when it finally did, It gave me some weird system error warnings, and the windows explorer crashed every 20 seconds, all my display drivers were gone, and weirdly all the bookmarks in google chrome were gone.

So naturally I turned off my caching that I was doing with my Agility 3 60 GB, made it a standalone drive, and installed a fresh copy of windows on it. All was good and nice for about 3 hours on the new build. I installed all the drivers, Diablo 3, played Diablo for about 20 min, then turned on windows anytime upgrade to upgrade my windows to win7 ultimate (i used a win7 pro disc to install, but had a win7 ult key). Then i started downloading League of Legends while it was doing its thing and went to get some lunch.

Upon returning to my computer it was trying to startup repair itself, and said it had failed at repeating. Every time I try to boot it blue screen instantly upon the windows logo appearing (the bios loads fine, then it says starting windows and the 4 colours start to form into a windows logo, and that's where it crashes, every time, at the exact same moment.)

I went to my bios and noticed that my 2500K, which I put back to stock clocks, was running at 60c, which is super hot at idle, considering I'm using a Corsair H50 water cooler on it. That was odd, so i upped all my fan speeds. Then i tried booting with only one stick of ram, trying all 4 of my sticks, in case I had some bad RAM.

Nothing works. Windows won't boot, I can't boot into the windows installer on the disc, my CPU is running hot (on that note my RAM was quite hot when I took it out, i dunno how hot RAM usually gets though). So I'm kinda thinking that maybe my motherboard is blown, but then I'm confused as to why the bios and everything works fine.

For the record I totally switched hard drives after the initial crash at the start. I'm only using the SSD + a 2 TB for data, no caching. I had a 300 GB in there before, which I totally removed, thinking it was the culprit to my problems.

I need a computer ASAP for my business (I build computers for ppl) so I'm wanting to get this fixed quickly. What do you guys recommend?

[frontier204]

Clear your CMOS before any additional diagnostics.

Last time I plugged an ODD (reverse polarity! darned cheap adaptor) in while my computer was still running I just blew out the ODD with no damage to anything else. That said, I didn't have a data cable connected to my ODD at the time - it was just the power cable.

Windows freezing just as the windows logo appears happens to me if I overclock too high... 60 degrees for a Sandy Bridge idle is VERY high, considering they draw <15W idle... Check the thermal compound and reseat your CPU cooler, as a failed or improperly mounted cooler is about the only way you can get that kind of temps.

[BigPhatPaulie]

Try a new mobo? not sure what part is failing exactly but it sounds like something got shorted out somewhere (maybe not enough to fail completely but enough for it to cause your issues)

[SneakySnake]

I was able to finally get windows installed. I also cleared the CMOS first like you said. I had to change my HDD mode to AHCI (it was in RAID, for the smart caching). Then it seemed to install fine. Odd things happen though. I installed the ISRT driver (intel smart reponse tech) in order to setup caching, upon restart my computer failed to boot (blue screened when trying to load windows), so I recovered windows back to the state before I installed that driver and it worked fine. Tried same thing again, and it started crashing again. The driver is directly from Gigabyte's website, so it's odd that it does that.

I just won't install it. Fingers crossed nothing is shorted out or broken. I have my suspiciouns that the mobo is shorted like you said, but I'm not gonna get a new one unless it starts giving me more problems.

Windows is freshly reinstalled for the 3rd time today, and seems to finally be working.

My temps are in order. It seems like everything was under max load/high volts when it kept crashing last time.