Is it my hard drive, motherboard, or processor? Please help!

[pmcmill]

Yesterday morning, I noticed windows had installed a critical update and restarted my computer. After I logged back in, I launched Firefox, and my computer froze. I restarted numerous time and it kept freezing. I started in safe mode, got everything off my hard drive (just in case), ran some scans, restarted again, with the same freezing. Windows loads, but as soon as the desktop appears, it freezes. Safe mode continued to work normally. I have tried to restore to an earlier date, tried to boot from the last successful boot, and nothing worked. Finally, I tried to reformat my hard drive. The first time, it failed. After trying again, my computer no longer found a hard drive to reformat.

I installed a different hard drive, it formatted successfully, but during the final setup screen, it continues to freeze. I can not get past the setup. What do you think the issue is?

 

[Paul NZ]

Could be the sata port/s if you tried another hdd (if theyre sata)

Try another sata port. Or try another sata cable. It's either the cable or port, if it cant find the hdd

 

[arges86]

ran some scans, restarted again, with the same freezing.

Just out of curiosity what scans did you run?

So, It seems like a hardware issue since you've used a different hard drive to re-install Windows.
The first thing I would do is turn the PSU off, unplug all the cables (SATA, Power, etc.) and plug them back in. Something could have been loose.
Try running it with one stick of RAM instead of two, to see if a module is dead.
Like Paul NZ said, try swapping out the SATA cable and see if the issue persists.

At what point during final setup does it freeze? Is there text on the screen? Does all your hardware show up in your BIOS/UEFI?
Also, before you formatted your hard drive did you check Event Viewer to see if it logged an error?

 

[pmcmill]

There are no errors logged. My husband had me do a disk cleanup, and some virus/spyware scans. Everything was fine until that critical update. The computer has been unplugged and plugged back in several time between moving it from my desk to my husbands. When it freezes, it is at the black screen that says "Set up is preparing your computer for first use". Sometimes it sits there for less than a minute before freezing, sometimes it is a few minutes. Before we reformatted, it was freezing after my desktop came up (after a startup), while it was trying to load startup programs.

Everything looks normal in BIOS. I will see if my husband has another SATA cable he can try. Right now, he has moved back to my original hard drive, and is trying to get it to boot up after re-formatting the hd again.

 

[arges86]

I would also try testing your memory with something like MemTest86.
It boots from a USB drive, so you don't need to have Windows running to use it.
The free version should work fine for your needs

 

[pmcmill]

Ok, I will see if that comes up with anything. Thank you.