Solved Pc crashed, won't restart, won't repair, won't boot to USB

Hey, I'm in a bit of a pickle.



My pc froze when I was browsing the web. It gave a blue screen with a sad face emoticon saying it had encountered a problem and needed to restart.

Upon restarting it tried to repair / restore but crashed again and restarted again. I have tried booting to a USB loaded Windows 8.1 pro setup. The Win 8 "setup fish" appears however it doesn't actually enter setup. After a moment the "setup fish" disappears and the screen goes black for a moment then a message is displayed on a blue screen saying File:\windows\system32\boot\winload.exe could not be loaded. I wondered if this means it is still trying to boot the OS so i disabled the hard drives in bios just leaving USB but Windows 8 setup still won't boot and I still get the same error message.



What could be the cause of this? How can I fix it? My motherboard is an ASUS p7p55d. At the moment I am just using my phone to write this.



Many thanks for your help,

Duncan

Hi Duncan,

It seems that there maybe RAM related problem. Please remember the golden rule of hardware troubleshooting that try starting the PC up with the bare minimum hardware configuration.

Please remove all the extra parts and have only the bare minimum. If you are having multiple RAM modules as well, then try the setup with only one RAM module connected at a time. This will help in troubleshooting the problem quickly and get the Dump files as well (if they were not caused by hardware failure).

Thanks blueelvis, I've figured it out. It was one of the RAM DIMMs. Even though the POST LEDs were not showing any error with the RAM and it was showing in the BIOS fine. Now I have to see if I can get new RAM under the Corsair Warranty.

Glad that you figured it out ^_^.

It happens all the time, my HP desktop will do it randomly all out of the blue sometimes, beeping and not starting but when I leave it for sometime, it tends to startup. This can happen that some very minor damage has occurred to the RAM module and only when it is accessed, it causes the crash.

I would also advise you to check your system if it is being overclocked. Furthermore, blow compressed air in the RAM slots to make sure that there are no dust particles present in them as they also sometimes cause such problems and buying new RAM does not fix that. Furthermore, make sure your PSU is also fine ^_^.

In case of any further help required, do not hesitate to post back here ^_^. Also could you please mark this thread as Solved?