Pc freezing after initial boot

[-Darkmessiah]

Hiya folks I hope you are well!

So this morning my PC started freezing on windows load. It would go through the initial boot then freeze on the windows icon with no loading circle.

I've spent a good 10 hour with it tidy trying a lot of different things and am at the end of my rope, so any help would be fantastic!

So far I have...

Attempted to sort the issue though startup repair, it would just freeze after initial boot
Dusted with compressed air
Checked everything is plugged in correctly
Checked my main hard drive worked in a different pc (which it did).
Formatted and reinstalled windows 10 on that hard drive on a separate pc, now when I boot with that hard drive it goes through initial boot then the bios beeps rapidly and continually.
Formatted and installed windows on my second hard drive. That gets past initial boot but then gets stuck on a black screen with a flashing underscore.

Am running on a MSI 760GM-P23 (FX)
500W PSU
2x Kingston 4gb ddr3
AMD quad core
Gtx 960

Thanks for reading,

John

 

[LukeFatwalker]

In cases like this, the issue boils down to:

1) BIOS. Reset and upgrade the BIOS firmware

2) RAM. Move the sticks around and if that doesn't work you can try swapping out a new RAM all together.

3) Primary Hard Drive. The Hard Drive your OS is on could be damaged, might want to run diagnostics or replace. (More for future reference, sounds like this isn't the issue for you)

I would recommend starting with the BIOS, it's most often times that, and your issues all sound to be a result of that. Especially if you've had issues with the machine even after re-installing the OS.

Once you are up and running, would recommend running a backup just in case this happens again. A tool like Macrium Reflect or Rollback Rx will work.

 

[-Darkmessiah]

Thanks for the response Luke!

I reset the bios to default settings, no difference, cleared bios. No difference.

I can't test the ram to be 100% sure but I've individually tested 4 pieces of ram (2 original and 2 from an old build), with the same result, (display hangs at a black screen with blinking under score) so am fairly certain it's not the ram.

Thanks for the backup recommendations, will look at updating the bios