Question Troubleshooting after being extremely stupid !

[Mr.CJ]

Hey,

I have revoked my own PC building license with immediate effect after I managed to remove my RAM for swapping before I removed the input power. So yes, this was plain stupidity from my side, no need to amplify that, but I would very much like some pointers for my coming troubleshooting.

OS: Windows 10 Pro 64bit
Monitor: AOC 27" something 1080p 144Hz
Motherboard: ASUS MAXIMUS VIII RANGER
CPU: Intel Core i5-6600K Skylake
GPU: Palit GeForce GTX 1070 Super JetStream - 8GB GDDR5
RAM: Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4-3000 DC 16GB
Storage: Samsung 870 EVO 500GB SSD (OS)
Storage 2: Kingston NV2 M.2 NVMe SSD, 2TB (Storage)
Power supply: Cooler Master V 750W

So, what happened? I've had a new pair of RAM sticks lying around for a while as I was going to change my old ones as I was starting to get blue screens with reference to memory failure and mem check indicated faulty memory. I suddenly got the urge to change them, shut down the computer, and opened the case. After I had removed 1 stick I realized that the input power was still present as I had not disconnected the PSU. I was of course very happy with my own stupid actions and immediately removed input power. After that, I continued to remove the other one and then installed the two new ones. When booting it seemed like something was off. It would not start windows. It tried starting recovery but did not get to load the recovery tool. I checked in the bios that the RAM was present. I reverted to the old memory, but the issue persisted. The RAM is still shown in BIOS, but it does not move on to the actual recovery tool. After this, I just disconnected the power again and I haven't touched it since.

I kinda get the feeling that it might be a disk issue. Though it seems to struggle a bit with booting, I can still enter BIOS and see the RAM and it moves forward and seems to be trying to load from the boot disk. could the memory removal have corrupted the boot disk, and could I be so lucky that I only need to reinstall Windows? Should I expect the memory to be faulty, or should I expect this to have caused issues in other places in the system? I had shut down the computer, it was not in sleep mode. From reading different stuff on the web it seems I should expect everything from a completely fried system, to no harm done.

Before I try out some more troubleshooting on my own I would very much appreciate input on how to move forward and what the most likely issues could be.

Thank you all in advance.

Best regards,
Stupid

 

[Ralston18]

Will the system boot into Safe Mode?

 

[Mr.CJ]

Will the system boot into Safe Mode?

I cannot get that far. I can select boot devices and bios seems to be ok, but the furthest I get is that it say it is preparing to repair and gets no further than that.

 

[geofelt]

As a test with the new ram,
Run memtest86 or memtest86+
They boot from a usb stick and do not use windows.
You can download them here:

MemTest86 - Official Site of the x86 Memory Testing Tool

MemTest86 is the original self booting memory testing software for x86 and ARM computers. Supporting both BIOS and UEFI, with options to boot from USB.

www.memtest86.com

Memtest86+ | The Open-Source Memory Testing Tool

Memtest86+ is an advanced, free, open-source, stand-alone memory tester for 32- and 64-bit computers (UEFI & BIOS supported)

www.memtest.org

If you can run a full pass with NO errors, your ram should be ok.

Running several more passes will sometimes uncover an issue, but it takes more time.
Probably not worth it unless you really suspect a ram issue.

I suspect that you had enabled secure boot which would only boot with the original windows.
Try clearing the bios settings back to the default.