Windows 8.1 horrendous crash!

[saintsixx]

I have an Acer Aspire TC-105, it's just over a year old now.
I changed the graphics card to a GTX 650 and in the bios made sure to change everything that would get it to load correctly as Acer are not keen on letting you install components that are not Acer.
Now, the past few months (after installing the 650 and it running fine), it's been crashing on load up, and occasionally on exiting programmes, and then on shut down. Sometimes it shuts down, fan stops whirring, monitor light goes off, but the PC light stays on. Have to hard shut down a lot, and leave it alone for a while also. Secure boot was disabled to get this to work.

Now, last night I went to update and shut down, turned off the monitor and went to bed. Didn't tell partner that it was doing updates, and he informed me that it had done the strange shut down, and he hard shut down.
This morning when I tried to turn it on, it was BSOD looping constantly - couldn't do a thing. We tried reinstalling the old graphics card as to which that didn't help.
He went to buy a new one, AMD R9 270X as it is compatible with the PC without messing in the bios with secure boot.

Upon installing the new card, same problem. We have tried everything we can think of, such as trying it with the motherboard graphics, changing cards, changing bios settings.
I then downloaded and burnt onto a disc, Windows 8.1 from the Microsoft create media tool - to try and completely reinstall Windows.
I changed the settings in bios to boot up from disc first - and got the error message of "Choose correct boot media or insert media into selected boot device and press a key".

Now, I change the BIOS settings back to boot from hard drive - which is showing in the BIOS, I change it to default, and nothing works as I still keep getting this error message.

Unfortunately I don't have any recovery disk, completely skipped our mind and now we are in such a predicament. Also, no idea where the windows product key is, and what I've read, it is hidden inside the motherboard due to coming preinstalled with 8.1

Any help would be greatly appreciated, and hopefully we don't have to splash out on more money

 

[johnbl]

For your current problem: reset the BIOS to defaults or update the BIOS, if the system BIOS can see the hard drive, then try and see if your SATA mode is set correctly (ide or AHCI mode) for a newer system, it should most likely be set to AHCI mode.
Now when you attempt to boot windows, if you get a bugcheck, what is the bugcheck code?

Sometimes a system will reorder the logical drives and assign drive letters to partitions that did not have one assigned a drive letter.
(hidden partitions) This will cause your windows drive to appear to move to a new drive letter and the boot loader will not find it and generate a bugcheck.
Fix is to boot on a disk image of windows, run the diskpart.exe command and display and re assign the drive letters.
(best to google for instructions if this is the case, depends on the bugcheck code)


------
For the original problem of windows refusing to shutdown:

Enable verbose status messages to figure out why your system would not shutdown.
find this spot in the registry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Policies \ System
add this dword key and set it to 1 to enable 0 to disable
verbosestatus
http://www.thewindowsclub.com/enable-verbose-status-message-windows