Question Optiplex 7010 SFF suddenly freezes during W10 installation

Balrog49

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Dec 6, 2015
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It gets almost all the way through the W10 Pro installation, then freezes with a gray screen and has to be powered off. It's not a BSOD. Diagnostics all pass fine. New power supply installed. New SSD installed. Same behavior no matter what I do.

This has me frustrated. I go back to Windows 3.1 and I've never seen this behavior before. There's no event log to check. Any suggestion would be appreciated.
 

Balrog49

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Optiplex 7010 SFF with the original ram and hdd?
hardware test your system?
I bought it used so I don't know whether or not anything is original. It passes the built-in diagnostics just fine. The built-in GPU stopped working so I installed an AMD Radeon HD 6450 1GB low profile video card in addition to the new power supply. The system came with an SSD and an HDD but Windows was running from the HDD. I've wiped the HDD and I'm installing W10 Pro on the SSD.
 

Balrog49

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Those things are pretty infamous for PSU issues as 240w is just way under-speced. The connectors do appear to be standard ATX so if the pinout colors are the same I'd just test with a regular ATX PSU sitting next to it outside the case.
I looked everywhere online (even places I wouldn't normally go) for a more powerful PSU but couldn't find one the right shape to fit inside the case. Having one outside the case would defeat the whole purpose of the small form factor, i.e., a small footprint for a small workspace. I'm going to try taking the hard drive out and running from the SSD. That should reduce the load. If it works I'll get an AC-powered USB enclosure for the hard drive or just an external SSD.