first time being "stumped", 7+ yo rig cant boot

[tastegw]

was a normal day the other day, was listening to music on pc while multi tasking on phone. then pc crashes out of the blue. would not boot up afterwards.

it gets stuck right at the windows rotating circle after the windows image. irql_less_blah_blah

tested my ram, same results.
checked all connections, reset bios, tried to boot in safe mode, no luck....then tried to just install a new copy of windows, could not even get the usb to boot.

i get video, bois loads fine, temps all normal, no OC, and at a loss.

im thinking my HD is bad? but why would that prevent my usb from booting

maybe my motherboard or cpu?
i have no way to test those as i have no spare parts to swap with.

any advice?

 

[Shibumi]

I recently was reinstalling windows on a build I was working on, and I was getting stuck at the same spot as you. Windows logo popped up, then it would freeze at the rotating circle. It ended up being a bad hard drive. I put in a new hdd and the install went fine.

 

[tabascosauz]

Interestingly enough, I rebuilt a rather old Ivy Bridge Xeon platform recently and ran into the same issue when reinstalling a clean version of Windows 10. Thought the HDD was bad (still probably is), and was able to install and boot with an SSD; however, the behaviour persisted. The next time I was able to get into Windows, I updated the HD5450 to the latest compatible Crimson drivers and it's largely gone away.

Seems like something in ver.2004 is causing problems for older rigs. It was working fine on 1909 previously, and never had anything like this in 6 years of daily office use.

 

[tastegw]

yes, there was a previous version my rig could never get installed, for about the last year, i would have to force it to an earlier version for a week or two, but win10 has forced updates , so every week or two it would try that one version again, only to fail. but this crash happened in-between updates, and not during one.