Question New build and weirdest problem I have ever encountered. please help!

khodex1997

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Sep 26, 2013
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So I'm upgrading my friends PC. Here are the new parts:
MSI MAG B550 Tomahawk Motherboard
AMD Ryzen 3900x CPU
Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro 2x16GB DDR4-3200 CL16 Ram
Corsair RMx (2018) 850 W 80+ Gold PSU

We were unable to get a GPU so we are reusing his Asus Strix GTX 970 4GB and his SSD and HDD were still fully functional.
I had done this to my own build before so I thought I would just take the (sata)SSD out of the old one and put it into the new build and just install the chipset drivers since the GPU drivers would be the same.

So I built the pc, got all the wires nice and managed and put the SSD in and boot up. It wouldn't load at first and I found out it was because the windows was in MBR and UEFI doesnt support MBR so I turned on legacy/CSM and it loads into windows but the task bar doesnt show up. It shows nothing but a black bar and when I hovered over it, it had a spinning wheel. I then tried left clicking it to no avail and so I tried to open something on the desktop and got a weird error that I cannot recall. I right clicked and explorer would crash and reboot really quick and finally the taskbar would show, only it was unclickable and still had a loading/spinning wheel but now I couldnt click anything on the desktop either. I tried restarting and it kept doing the same thing. I tried ctrl+alt+delete and I got a black screen and had to restart.

So I did some google-fu and found an article saying to use ctrl+alt+esc to open task manager and close explorer.exe and relaunch it using task manager which led me to the same result. I then tried my next idea of using a windows media installation tool to check for any errors. It found nothing. Srttrail.txt said the operating system booted correctly. I tried booting into safe mode but all I got was a black screen so I was really befuddled. I then tried soft resetting windows using the media installation tool and telling it to keep user files. That fixed nothing so I duplicated the drive to a spare SSD and went for the route of erasing the drive through a custom installation and when the windows media tool would restart to the hard drive it would say "starting services -> getting device ready 100% -> getting ready" then it would restart again and the spinning dots would start up and spin a few times before the spinning would freeze. (I swear it would start with small dots and after a few rotations switch to slightly larger dots before freezing)

Next I found a Microsoft forum saying to boot to the installation media and use shift+f10 to open the CMD and use diskpart -> disk list -> sel dis 0 -> clean -> exit then continue with the installation.
Still no luck so my friend recommended trying "clean all" and that took an hour or so and I tried to reinstall and same result. We tried using DISM and SFC scannow but since the drive didnt have a setup windows installation it said it couldnt work on windows PE or something. Its also worth nothing that I tried booting into safe mode after cleaning the drive and it said "windows media manager cannot install in safe mode" or something so I thought maybe it was trying to install windows in normal mode so I let it run for an hour or two and nothing happened so I shut it off. I checked all the power connections making sure they were plugged in and used my PSU checker to make sure they were giving power. I reseated the CMOS which also required reseating the GPU. I tried it with single sticks of ram using both sticks. The sata cables aren't bent at all either. I also updated the bios as well. After doing these and trying the cleaned SSD after each one I tried using the cloned SSD to boot and see if it was maybe the SSD and it has the same issue even after trying all this stuff. I can't open CMD or boot into safe mode to use DISM or SFC on the cloned SSD either, safe mode just brings up a black screen still.

We thought it may be some weird windows activation issue with the new motherboard but it should show an error or prompt us to reactivate windows instead of not loading the taskbar.

I'm genuinely befuddled with this strange issue. Please help. The SSD also opens fine if I plug it into my main pc's hard drive dock.
 
"I had done this to my own build before so I thought I would just take the (sata)SSD out of the old one and put it into the new build and just install the chipset drivers since the GPU drivers would be the same. "

^^^^^^Don't do this.

You should do a clean Windows install with a new motherboard.
 

khodex1997

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Sep 26, 2013
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"I had done this to my own build before so I thought I would just take the (sata)SSD out of the old one and put it into the new build and just install the chipset drivers since the GPU drivers would be the same. "

^^^^^^Don't do this.

You should do a clean Windows install with a new motherboard.
As I said further in I am attempting to do a clean install but even after cleaning the drive using diskpart and the "clean all" command It will not install.
 

khodex1997

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Sep 26, 2013
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I made some progress. Using an older iso(version 1507) I was able to actually install windows and boot. Everything seems to be working. It is failing to get certificates for both bing and google. The windows store also fails to open saying "try that again. something happened on our end. waiting a bit might help." but that may be because I'm sharing network connection through my main pc via ethernet cable. MSI's website isn't loading drivers but apparently its their end so I will check back later.

I am worried though, does this mean if I update windows it will stop working?
Is this some conflict with the bios? or maybe this specific SSD?

Edit: It wouldn't be the SSD because the build of windows that was on it before that was having issues worked fine in the last PC (same drive)