Unexpected BSOD: system can't recover

[Alex-C]

Hello!

I had a problem with my PC this week, and it's baffled me to the point of giving in and buying new PC parts and starting over to avoid total data loss.

I shut it down on Wednesday evening, it was a good shutdown with no errors that I was aware of.

I booted it up on Thursday, it needed to 'repair' windows before I could use it.

It repaired fine, all was well, was playing on max for a bit and I went to go get something, I come back, the PC was on BSOD but restarted before I could get the code.

This time, the repair failed, and I was taken to system restore, which also failed. Leaving me with an inaccessible PC (I have important work files that were created that very day and don't want to lose them)


I'm curious as to what could be the most feasible root cause here. As a PC doesn't get all riled up without good reason and it's never had an issue in the past.

Here is the behaviour it exhibited before the crash along with some context that may be helpful

The PC started behaving strange when the fridge compressor switched on, the screen used to 'twitch' but as time went on, the screen went blank, for an increasing amount of time, leading me to believe the power supply is failing. As this doesn't happen with my PlayStation 2 or 4

It was quite slow, a friend noticed it when he was teamviewing me, it was sluggish, not as nippy as it used to be, for a fresh windows 10 installation, this was particularly strange. Along with this, several software glitches and errors occurred from the offset, max crashing constantly, games not closing properly, software refusing to work without extra dynamic link libraries that my friend never had to use before. (this was prior to the RAM upgrade mentioned below)

I live next to a busy railway, sometimes the trains going by can shake the room quite a lot, which can't be good for the two mechanical disks sitting inside. (I've ordered an SSD for the new one to combat this)

Windows 10 refused to install onto my 500gb drive, reasons unknown so it was installed onto the newer 1Tb drive. And the 500gb repurposed as a second drive.

I recently installed new RAM, about three weeks ago, it has the same timings, frequency etc etc as the RAM already present and the computer appeared to be absolutely fine, in fact very quick and stable for the entirety of that duration.

The OS supposedly detected malware, a few days prior, however the history and quarantine was blank when I checked to see what it had picked up.

The last thing I remember hearing as the PC crashed was the second hard disk spinning up. However I'm not sure if the was just due to crash handling on windows' part.
The second hard disk contained no system files.

What are your best guesses here? I understand with no error code to go by this may be a bit far fetched, but I'm curious as to why it suddenly 'went'

Thanks for any help.

Feel free to move this if in the wrong section

 

[Colif]

Are you running pc through a surge protector? if so, make sure its got no warning lights on it as they only save you from one surge.. the fridge thing made me think you don't. Its probably safer.

is this post in sequential order, when did you install windows? after Wednesday? We can't identify BSOD if it happened before a fresh install. If it happened after the install, run http://www.resplendence.com/whocrashed - run a scan and it will tell you what might have caused crash. paste it here if its unclear

Did 500gb drive have warnings about not being right format or the installer just refused to let you do anything to it - did you try custom install? Does 500gb show up in disc management?

You may not need this bit:

You might need a win 10 install disc - get it here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/software-download/windows10

create a boot disc - usb or dvd, your choice
Change bios to boot from whatever you just made
Boot from this and on second screen after language choices, select repair this pc, NOT install.
You can try running repair again, or reset which is probably a better choice since the others failed. Choose save files and it will reinstall win 10 - you would need to reinstall all programs again.

Do you have all your libraries saved on second hard drive? Just curious as it would make a fresh install less painful - it is how I do it.

 

[smorizio]

aslo use hdtune read hard drive health. use hardware info 64 bit set it to sensor and logging to watc hyour power supply rails. boot off a memtest86 usb stick with old ram first if it passes swap the new ram in and the old ram out see if it works. with 4 slots filled of ram you may have to turn the dram voltage up a bit to make sure all the ram is stable. on the new/old ram make sure both ram are the same..if there single sided and dubble sidded ram they wont mix. try your pc on another outlet that not on the frig power to rule out low power/current. also check that your home has good grounds and power is stable. if the trains have over head power check your home for emp fields. i seen large emp fields wipe hard drives out. (green line here in mass) train going by do ark a large emp field.

 

[Alex-C]

Windows was reinstalled prior to the BSOD, I've not touched the PC since, the installation was done maybe about three to four weeks ago,

The PC isn't running on a surge protector, no, but myself and the landlady quickly ruled out any possibility of a surge as it would've blew out a third of the building 'supposedly' I actually believe the opposite is true, when the compressor on the fridge switches on, it drains the power in the circuits and undervoltages the PSU, causing the capacitors to wear down very fast and also leaves a large margin for severe data corruption should the hard disk be writing data at the time of occurrence however no noticeable data corruption occurred, I was able to open most of the files I needed as normal.

The error I recieved when attempting to install Windows on the 500gb drive was 'We couldn't create a new partition or locate an existing one"
I couldn't format the drive either, I can't remember the specific error it gave when attempting to format, but I had to use the 1TB and then format the 500gb drive once windows was installed via disk management.

The current plan at present is to build the new PC and salvage data from the older drives, and also migrate windows to a more stable solid state disk rather than the mechanical drives presently used.
This way I can get the minidump files from the old drives and anything important, thanks to its freshness all files can be dumped into the solid state disk for the time being.

I will most definitely be running HDD health as and when I'm back up and running, Windows read both drives as healthy, but I'm unsure if it was using the drives SMART info.

Both RAM sets are virtually the same, the only real difference is the heat spreader, other than that all three modules are exactly the same.

I'm going to route the new PC to a different socket to prevent interference from the fridge.

Will run memtest when I have the capabilities to create said memtest volume, right now all I really have is a windows 10 installer USB.

 

[Colif]

one way that would have fixed that error about 500gb drive: http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Crucial-SSDs/Can-t-install-Win-10-on-MX200-We-couldn-t-create-a-new-partition/td-p/172382