Ah man, where do I start...
My PC was running fine, up until I decided to upgrade my ram and replace my old HDD with a 250gb SSD. I'll list the things I did in order that lead to its demise.
1.) I First installed two new sticks of DDR3-1600mhz with my old HDD (didn't install SSD yet), and when I booted up my PC, it wouldn't even boot to BIOS, it just kept restarting every 5 seconds in a continuous loop.
2.) Took out new Ram, PC booted up normally. So I said hey, forget the ram for now, I'll add the SSD to the system. When I did, the same thing happened. PC wouldn't even get to BIOS to set up boot order nor let me get into Windows safe mode. Just a continuous restarting loop.
3.) So I decided to take out old HDD, and do a clean install of Windows 8 on the SSD, everything went smoothly except for one thing, Windows 8 didn't install a system reserve partition on the SSD. There's a 350mb volume that's "unallocated." I ignored it...After the install went smoothly, I installed my old HDD to the system and it was accepted and recognized. So I then decided to install my new Ram again, and that also was accepted!
4.) So, I restarted the PC a few times to make sure everything was running. Shut it off and on...everything was smooth. So I formatted my old HDD, all was well. Shut off my PC...and let's just say it never booted past BIOS again.
5.) I tried removing old HDD, still no luck. I removed new ram sticks, nothing. Heck, I even removed both the HDD and the SSD, no boot, no bios. Just stuck in a restart loop.
My motherboard is an MSI Z77A-G45, the new ram I bought is completely identical the my older ram, it's a corsair vengeance DDR3 1600mhz, even has the same timing, and with the upgrade it would have been 16gb total. My SSD is a Samsung Evo 840 250gb. Last time I flashed my BIOS was last year I believe.
Sorry for the long rant, just trying to be as precise as I can. I really did quite the number on my PC, and wished I did more research upgrading to an SSD beforehand. I really don't want to buy a new motherboard until I've tried almost everything first. Any ideas how I can get out of this repeating restarts? Because it's now happening with or without my drives installed.
My PC was running fine, up until I decided to upgrade my ram and replace my old HDD with a 250gb SSD. I'll list the things I did in order that lead to its demise.
1.) I First installed two new sticks of DDR3-1600mhz with my old HDD (didn't install SSD yet), and when I booted up my PC, it wouldn't even boot to BIOS, it just kept restarting every 5 seconds in a continuous loop.
2.) Took out new Ram, PC booted up normally. So I said hey, forget the ram for now, I'll add the SSD to the system. When I did, the same thing happened. PC wouldn't even get to BIOS to set up boot order nor let me get into Windows safe mode. Just a continuous restarting loop.
3.) So I decided to take out old HDD, and do a clean install of Windows 8 on the SSD, everything went smoothly except for one thing, Windows 8 didn't install a system reserve partition on the SSD. There's a 350mb volume that's "unallocated." I ignored it...After the install went smoothly, I installed my old HDD to the system and it was accepted and recognized. So I then decided to install my new Ram again, and that also was accepted!
4.) So, I restarted the PC a few times to make sure everything was running. Shut it off and on...everything was smooth. So I formatted my old HDD, all was well. Shut off my PC...and let's just say it never booted past BIOS again.
5.) I tried removing old HDD, still no luck. I removed new ram sticks, nothing. Heck, I even removed both the HDD and the SSD, no boot, no bios. Just stuck in a restart loop.
My motherboard is an MSI Z77A-G45, the new ram I bought is completely identical the my older ram, it's a corsair vengeance DDR3 1600mhz, even has the same timing, and with the upgrade it would have been 16gb total. My SSD is a Samsung Evo 840 250gb. Last time I flashed my BIOS was last year I believe.
Sorry for the long rant, just trying to be as precise as I can. I really did quite the number on my PC, and wished I did more research upgrading to an SSD beforehand. I really don't want to buy a new motherboard until I've tried almost everything first. Any ideas how I can get out of this repeating restarts? Because it's now happening with or without my drives installed.