Question Recently installed Win10 on a new SSD and am experiencing problems I've never had before

[adrift21]

Hello to everyone,

Recently I got SSD 860 EVO 2.5" SATA III 500GB and I wanted to do a clean Win10 installation on it.
I plugged it in the SATA slot next to my HDD slot, plugged the bootable USB flash drive, entered the installation, formatted my C partition on HDD to get rid of the old Windows, formatted the SSD, and installed Win10 on it. (the version of Win10 I installed was the vanilla version without any updates).
Everything was working fine, having done this many times before, I left the Win10 to update (started updating to 1809 automatically as this is the latest version, along with all other updates it always downloads).

Usually I always disable Windows Defender(using gpedit), turn off firewall, OneDrive etc... as I'm not a fan of these.
After Win10 updated to 1809, everything seemed to be fine, however, I then noticed some issues I've never seen before, and I've reinstalled Windows many times in the past by myself.

• The first issue I noticed was that Chrome was stuck on "establishing secure connection" and most of the time wouldn't load the page, however I managed to work around this by playing with some Cryptographic service settings.
• Second issue was that when I tried to access gpedit, services, etc... I was getting a message: administrator has blocked you from accessing etc... even though my acc was an administrator. (managed to fix this by disabling UAC completely)
• Third and most painful issue for me is that NVIDIA drivers failed to install, as well as GeForce Experience. I have tried literally everything I could find online regarding this and nothing worked. (DDU, installing in safe mode, all suggestions from NVIDIA website, etc.) I still haven't found a fix for this.

I reinstalled Win10 again(vanilla ver) but this time I used Win10 1803 .iso from Microsoft website and did an upgrade from within Windows (because I believe this is the version I had on my old HDD and not 1809) and it's the same thing!

Having the same issues again! I made sure to prevent Win from downloading 1809.
I activated the built in administrator acc on Win10 and am using that one which fixed problems 1. and 2. however NVIDIA still fails to install.
I believe I will run into even more issues the more I continue using my PC as I still haven't really downloaded any of the programs I usually work with.

-Does anyone have any idea why this could be happening?
-Can this in any way be tied to the SSD or is it a Win10 issue itself? (if it's the latter, how come everything was fine on HDD)
-Did I mess up the installation of Win on SSD? (both software and hardware wise)

Hardware:
ASUS Z97-AR
i7 4790k
GTX 970 Gigabyte G1
SSD 860 EVO 2.5" SATA III 500GB
WD Blue 1TB WD10EZEX

 

[Colif]

only thing I would have done differently was I would have removed hdd from PC when installing win 10, but that's mainly to avoid windows doing another feature it has which is to use blank space on other drives for its boot partition. this is only a problem if you later removed the other drive.

I don't think problem is the new ssd as you would have had other problems getting to the stage you are.

Normally only reason Nvidia drivers won't install is cause the version of windows is older than the drivers. Have you run windows update and allowed it to find drivers for the card? I only have a 980 and Windows has drivers for it on windows update.

what error is it showing for GPU? Is it saying it can't find the card?

You can't install drivers in safe mode normally anyway.

Second issue was that when I tried to access gpedit, services, etc... I was getting a message: administrator has blocked you from accessing etc... even though my acc was an administrator. (managed to fix this by disabling UAC completely)

you sometimes get this if you run windows update in the time you have PC set as active in Windows update. Look in settings/update & security/windows update - Change active hours. I just made mine active for 1 hour a day to avoid this.

 

[adrift21]

only thing I would have done differently was I would have removed hdd from PC when installing win 10, but that's mainly to avoid windows doing another feature it has which is to use blank space on other drives for its boot partition. this is only a problem if you later removed the other drive.

I don't think problem is the new ssd as you would have had other problems getting to the stage you are.

Normally only reason Nvidia drivers won't install is cause the version of windows is older than the drivers. Have you run windows update and allowed it to find drivers for the card? I only have a 980 and Windows has drivers for it on windows update.

what error is it showing for GPU? Is it saying it can't find the card?

You can't install drivers in safe mode normally anyway.



you sometimes get this if you run windows update in the time you have PC set as active in Windows update. Look in settings/update & security/windows update - Change active hours. I just made mine active for 1 hour a day to avoid this.

Hi,
The sentence about Nvidia not installing on Windows version older than drivers confuses me. I am able to install the newest drivers just fine on vanilla Win10 (the one without any updates).
Normally, as I first boot after new installation of Win, it installs some 2 years old driver for Nvidia. Just like it did this time, then I was able to install the new drivers successfully (while I was still on vanilla I mean).
Then I updated to 1803 and when I tried to launch GeForce experience, it just started updating automatically and failed with a message "install failed" or something like that.
It somehow launched afterwards, but I couldn't activate in game overlay aka shadowplay, it just says: That didn't work. Try restarting your system.

Tried to reinstall drivers and everything Nvidia again, and failed with the same message as on 1809 (it goes through checking hardware fine and when it starts installing it gets to "installing graphics driver" - basically like 1 inch of the progress bar, then just says: installer failed and that red "X" ).

I'm starting to think it doesn't have anything to do with the Win version at all, but rather one of those "security updates" or whatever, that get installed regardless. Problem is finding out which one and preventing it from installing.
But again, how was this not happening on the Win10 I had on HDD, which was getting regularly updated (I was just pausing updates, but you can do that only for a month or so, then you need to download them anyway). I appreciate your input.

 

[Colif]

So how old is this vanilla version?

Why not try clean installing 1809 instead of putting an old version on and then upgrading, its essentially the same thing as 1803 & 1809 are version updates. when you install them they essentially replace the installed version of windows each time. 1809 includes all the patches included in 1803 so that could explain why it has same result.

your PC very similar to mine, I have an Asus Z97 Pro, 4690K, GTX 980, and storage similar too... so it shouldn't be a hardware problem.