Computer won't get past POST

[The Original Ralph]

i built this system 3 years ago - system specs

CPU i7-4790
Mobo Asus Z97M-Plus
drives - multiple, up until recent Samsung NVMes, a 950 and a 960 plus a few storage drives
ram - G.skill 1600 DDR3, 32 GB
PSU - Seasonic SSR550
OS Windows 7 Home Premium


every few months since new, it would occasionally not get past POST ie freezing on the splash screen and i'd do a hard restart, sometimes on the next boot it would go into windows, sometimes it would take 2-3 attempts. Today i've done multiplle attempts, have left it off, with cord unplugged, tried it with a Recovery disk in the BD tray - it will not boot past POST.

Recent history - i purchased 2 additional G.Skill sticks of ram, identical part # to the first two, 8 GB each bringing it to 32 GB. After installing i found win 7 home premium doesn't support more than 16 GB of ram, so i upgraded to Win 7 Ultimate. After the install i downloaded about 1.5 GB of windows updates, installing 30-40 at a time, and just near the end or the last couple of updates, the system crashed and on reboot i got a black screen with a big red message box with a stmt about "a recent firmware/hardware has this system incompatible, hit OK to move to the next secure boot device"

I made it into BIOS and in Boot settings > Secure, changed the setting to "Other OS" from UEFI Windows Manager and it booted

i went back and finished the update downloads.

Win 7 Ultimate was on two NVMe SSDs (samsung), one was a backup clone - i go into disk management and put the clone "offline" after cloning. I also had two Samsung sata SSDs that had Win 7 Home premium, one being a clone, and i keep both or kept both offline.

Last night i also re-flashed the latest BIOS to the mobo - same as i have probably done half dozen times, only because it had given me one instance yesterday of not getting past POST with one a week or so earlier and i figured it might be a good idea to refresh it. I also cleared CMOS with both the RTC jumper and the battery

This morning i was doing something, and noticed in disk management, after putting the backup clone disks "online" that i no longer had the ability to put them back offline. That choice was not there when i right clikked on a disk. Then the system wouldn't restart a few minutes later after i'd updated a 3rd party software program. I went into BIOS to select the back up or clone NVMe SSD with the same OS, win 7 ultimate and it wouldn't boot with the same red box msg.

So i went into BIOS to boot into one of the Sata SSDs with Win 7 Home Premium, and it would not boot - went into BIOS to change the setting at Boot > Secure back to UEFI Windows, which the Home premium OS had run on for 2.5 years

Then the computer wouldn't boot at all into win 7, not getting past POSt

Any suggestions, ideas etc - thanks in advance

 

[smorizio]

unplug evrythng you can booth from one ram stick and onboard video see if it the video card or mb that went bad.

 

[The Original Ralph]

unplug evrythng you can booth from one ram stick and onboard video see if it the video card or mb that went bad.

that worked - i had already pulled two of the sticks out earlier as well as the two NVMe drives, and this system doesn't have a GPU (this is not the rig you see in my sig) but i pulled one stick leaving one stick in, unplugged all drives and the damn thing booted - I then shut it down, put the 2nd stick back in and it booted again. I booted again off the other win 7 home premium Sata ssd and ran like a champ

man thank you big time - i'll definitely sleep easier not laying there going thru all the possibilities in my head

any idea what could have caused it? Does the fact that it does it every few months regardless of any changes to the system - does that tell you anything? Is it a sign the MB is weak - i've been thinking about buying a back up as this system serves me & the wife well for what we use it

 

[smorizio]

make sure you have the newest bios on the mb. it may be a bios bug as newer ssd just came out a few years ago with windows 10. also windows bug as windows 7 does not have all the updated drivers that 7 has.

 

[smorizio]

assu mb have more then one year warranty on them check by it serial number if it still in warranty.

 

[The Original Ralph]

actually this mobo is 3 yrs old (Nov 2014) and i was curious about the warranty last nite so I looked thru the asus manual for the warranty - it stated "NO Warranty" unequivocalibly, the only reason i was asking was the Z97M-Plus is no longer available except from a few ebay sellers wanting almost $300 - i paid $126 when new. There are some ASUS H97 Micro-ATX boards, new in box still available for $149 and i was thinking of grabbing one just to have as backup

The BIOS has never been totally stable, occasionally i'd find settings having reset themselves but ASUS hasn't updated the BIOS for my mobo since 3/25/2016

But i think i found the problem - one of the windows updates i think messed with the samsung NVMe driver - i've got 2 samsung NVMe SSDs and i had no problem with the Win 7 home Premium vs installed, when i upgraded to win 7 ultimate they still ran fine - it wasn't until a ton of updates had downloaded, and it was almost the last update that locked the system. Your trick got me out of that locked state, and i was able to boot on a backup Sata SSD running windows 7 home premium. I then re-installed the samsung driver or rather let it do a "repair" of the driver, and the PCIe drives both booted fine

i may pick one of those boards up just to have as a backup[


smorizio - thanks again for that trick,