[SOLVED] Bricked Win 10 System - Out of Ideas

[kwangle]

Hi All,

I have a newly built system that I have been using sucessfully for a few weeks. Spec:

Ryzen 7 3700x,
32GB Corsair Vengeance 3600 (4 x 8GB),
Sabrent 1GB M2 PCIE 4.0,
Asus Prime x470 Pro motherboard,
4TB HDD.

I've been tuning the RAM timings in the BIOS and its been tricky. I have got faster timings working but after pushing this further and testing for RAM stability in AIDA 64 had crashes. Now WIndows won't boot and I'm stuck in a repair loop and get CRITICAL PROCESS DIED messages. I assumed I could just revert the mobo back to base settings but the issues are persisting. I'm reasonably tech savvy so have spent many hours yeasterday trying to resolve this issue but nothing is working. So far I've ried:

Resetting BIOS to stock settings
Loading BIOS settings I know work
Trying to do a Windows repair install from USB (it won't allow this as you have to be in booted system to do this and it won't boot)
Running various command line tools such to check disk (OK) and rebuild MBR etc
Updating BIOS to latest version

Nothing has worked and I really don't want to wipe SSD and start again. I want to repair Windows and retain settings if possible.

Is a full reinstall my only option at this stage? How can I repair windows from a USB drive with full options?

Any help would be greatly appreciated - Thanks.

 

[Saga Lout]

I recommend removing the hard disk and retrieving any data you might want to keep. Buy the gear to slave that disk to another machine if you can't fit it inside.

Once those data are safe you might as will format the hard disk and start again, using another PC, download a new version of Windows 10 1909 and a utility named Rufus to make a USB stick bootable.

When you run the new system for the first time, disconnect from the Net or Microsoft will force you to have a MS Account instead of the conventional User Account. They can't steal as much data if you do it that way and that's why they like us using the old method.

 

[kwangle]

I recommend removing the hard disk and retrieving any data you might want to keep. Buy the gear to slave that disk to another machine if you can't fit it inside.

Once those data are safe you might as will format the hard disk and start again, using another PC, download a new version of Windows 10 1909 and a utility named Rufus to make a USB stick bootable.

When you run the new system for the first time, disconnect from the Net or Microsoft will force you to have a MS Account instead of the conventional User Account. They can't steal as much data if you do it that way and that's why they like us using the old method.

Thanks for the advice but I'm trying to avoid doing this. I have other options such as installing WIndows on another drive on the same machine, booting from that and then accessing the corrupt system and whatever files I may want. I have a laptop and an older PC but neither of them have an M2 slot so, as you say, I will need to buy a PCIEor USB slot to M2 adapter to connect the drive with the problematic system.

One detail I did not mention is that the M2 drive is partitioned into 2 volumes. About 120 GB for Windows and the remaining 750GB as a separate volume for progs I need to be responsive. I don't know if this is part of the problem but drive check out as OK with CheckDisk.

There's nothing critical on the drive, I'm just a bit surprised about how weak the Windows tools are in fixing the issue and how a few crashes could have caused such a problematic situation. This does seem to be a common problem with Win 10.

Thanks for your help. I am considering doing a reinstall as this may be my only option!