[SOLVED] Looking for advice on fixing my rig

[205jeberspacher]

Hello forum! So I have a rig that was GREAT....5 years ago. My components can be found over here. I have since added 1 500gb SSD and a 3TB external hard drive. I know its about time for a new rig, but I need to get a bit more time out of the rig to save up for the new one, and I really believe I should be able to get a bit more out of these components since I'm not running extremely new games or anything in 4k.

In these past few months, I've noticed my PC slowly become more and more unstable. Now, it has gotten to the point that when I power it up at the beginning of the day, I am usually plagued with some issues. Either my graphics drivers don't start (or get corrupted and need re-installed through using DDU), my sound drivers stop working, I get USB errors from my MOBO (gets stuck at 9C/A2 error before going to BIOS), or it is so sluggish that it is unusable. After several reboots, it usually starts working just fine aside from a few applications. It is strange because I can run games such as League or Civ V without any sort of issues, even with chrome open. Same story with using my heavy-duty video editing software (it only crashes seldomly but that wasn't abnormal before). But if I open something like Kerbal Space Program, my computer starts freaking out and giving me black screens/freezes that require a full reboot to clear the error. If I have chrome open it also freezes and says that is has run out of memory (I have 16gb of RAM and this error occurs when around 10+ GB of RAM usage).

I'm writing this post because I have tried every solution I could find on the forums for these problems. I have gotten to the point where I assume it's one of three things, power, OS, or Motherboard. Since beginning on this troubleshooting adventure, I have tried SFC /scannow, DISM, Disk check, recreating my boot code, checking for loose power connectors, windows RAM memory diagnostic, a scan for bad sectors on my C: drive, and a full OS refresh.

SFC and the OS refresh don't work claiming either that Windows Resource Protection could not perform the requested operation, or that my Windows drive is locked and cannot be refreshed (I've tried both my original install disk and a USB with a Windows 10 iso). I have tried troubleshooting both of these issues (following every guide I could find) to no avail. Disk Check and the RAM diagnostic came back clean, and no bad sectors were found on my hard drive. Through all of this, I have never gotten a BSOD, just flickering and a frozen/locked up computer. Only once have I gotten any artifacting.

Aside from my last idea of hitting this thing repeatedly with a hammer until I get my angst out, what do you think I should try? I am officially out of good ideas.

 

[DSzymborski]

When you're trying to wipe and reinstall Windows, where are you starting from? In Windows or booting to the flash drive? And is the hard drive disconnected when you do this?

 

[205jeberspacher]

When you're trying to wipe and reinstall Windows, where are you starting from? In Windows or booting to the flash drive? And is the hard drive disconnected when you do this?

I have started from both windows in normal and safe mode. Both tell me to insert my OS Download Media. I then have booted from my old windows 8.1 disc (I’m on 10 now) and an image of the latest windows 10 version for USB created by the windows media creation tool.

Both tell me my drive where windows is installed is locked. I have also done this process with & without my external drive plugged in, but I have left my internal drives connected. Should I try it when only the C drive is connected?

I just tried running Startup Repair. It told me that it couldn't fix my problem. Here is the error log from the diagnosis

Root cause found:
---------------------------
Unspecified changes to system configuration might have caused the problem.

Repair action:
Result: Failed. Error code = 0x32
Time taken = 78 ms

Repair action: System files integrity check and repair
Result: Failed. Error code = 0x57
Time taken = 1047 ms

 

[DSzymborski]

Don't do it through Windows. Boot directly to the flash drive. And only the drive on which you're installing the OS on. This is a recommendation to do for any install, not just one in which you're having problems.

It's a good idea to have as little connected as possible. You're having issues and the fewer the things, the fewer the sources of problems!

 

[205jeberspacher]

Don't do it through Windows. Boot directly to the flash drive. And only the drive on which you're installing the OS on. This is a recommendation to do for any install, not just one in which you're having problems.

It's a good idea to have as little connected as possible. You're having issues and the fewer the things, the fewer the sources of problems!

It still gives me the same result, saying the drive windows is installed on is locked.

 

[Karadjgne]

If you have any data whatsoever that's important or irreplaceable, back it up to the external drive. Make sure you have logged into Microsoft.com and have your pc/windows registered there.

Download a current iso and use the media creation tool to make a bootable USB drive. Unplug the external drive.

How to Manage Partitions on Windows Without Downloading Any Other Software

There are tons of third-party partition managers for Windows, but did you know that Windows includes its own? Microsoft did a good job of hiding the Disk Management tool, but it's there.

www.howtogeek.com

Delete every volume.
I'm assuming the 120Gb is currently the C drive. Going to change that. Unplug every data cable to every drive except the 500Gb ssd. Use the USB now to put windows onto that drive.

When finished installing windows, go to the motherboard website and download the chipset drivers, goto the gpu website and install the gpu drivers. Only after all that is done, then plug the remaining drives back in. During reboot you should be asked which OS you want to boot to. Select the 500Gb. Once windows loads delete the volume - create partition on the 120Gb. That'll now be a scratch disk, someplace to download stuff to, use as pagefile, a working disk. The old hdd will be long term storage, the external is backup.

The only reason I suggest this complete wipe is that although there might not be errors you can see, you have windows so twisted up it can't even fix itself, and you've mixed in win8.1 from cd, win10 iso from usb, everything is going to be conflicting.

Better to just start clean from scratch.