Decade old 2500k Win10 installation about to be murdered

Andrew_McP · 13 May 2021 at 19:32

I'm perfectly happy with my 2500k/12GB/1070 when I want the 27" desktop experience for photo/video editing. But it, sadly, is not happy with the (now necessary) update from ver.1909 to 20H. I've been through all the online suggestions, but it keeps requiring a revert or even reload from backup every time I try.

So I'm about to wipe and reinstall. Have Win10 key, have latest installation on a DVD (remember them?) and... And I reckon the chances of a vanilla install being able to find all the right drivers after all this time is slim to none! So I'm pleased I spend most of my life on a laptop now, because this could all end in tears.

Or reinstalling the 1909 backup from yesterday, for as long as that'll work.

All in all, this week has reminded my why I stopped upgrading. Windows is great when it 'just works', but somehow always ends up finding exciting ways to waste your life. :-)

We who are about to wipe ten years of sludgy old driver fudge salute you!

Orcvader · 13 May 2021 at 20:03

Just try it. I had to install 20H2 on some refurbished PCs at work with much older hardware, and it still found the drivers without issues.

Also, no need to enter the license key, it will activate itself as soon as it's connected to the internet since the license is tied with the motherboard.

Andrew_McP · 13 May 2021 at 20:21

Orcvader said:
it still found the drivers without issues.

Reassuring, thanks.

Wondered about the licence. Time will tell. But I'm now trying to make a USB boot drive. The DVD I burned was my last non-RW disk (I threw a load out years ago!) and it doesn't want to work in the 2500k. The DVD-RWs I have haven't quite got the room to put the ISO on.

Bad omen. Especially as my motherboard has never booted reliably from USB. Speaking of which, I never did RMA it.... it's one of the original release with the dodgy Intel SATA controller. Maybe I left it a bit late? ;-)

Journey · 13 May 2021 at 20:37

It will be totally fine, 20H2 is great with older Core-i(series) hardware.

You are doing the right thing booting/installing from USB, once you've got it all up and running if you want to turn off some of the more annoying Windows 10 features you get Winaero tweaker, great tool.

Terminal_Boy · 13 May 2021 at 20:52

I’ll be watching this thread as moving my 2500K system to Win 10 is my next tech project.

I will be cheating slightly by putting a fresh Win 10 install on a new SSD and keeping my old Win 7 boot drive in the system as a back up.

MagicBoy · 13 May 2021 at 20:58

Should be fine. I put 1909 on a similar era Dell i3 to use an HTPC, found everything apart from the weird onboard sound chip.

Andrew_McP · 13 May 2021 at 22:46

Terminal_Boy said:
I’ll be watching this thread

I'd watch someone else if I were you, I've got nowhere! :-)

Stripped it down to bare essentials (nothing plugged in, OC removed, only the C: drive connected) but after the initial boot successful boot & setup from USB, the following reboot ends up in blue screens and hanging and assorted technopoxation.

Tomorrow I should probably do a bit of Memtesting, just in case, but tonight it's Gremlins: 1, Andy McP: 0. Could be that there were hidden problems with this ancient system and 1909 worked happily by pure luck.

MagicBoy · 13 May 2021 at 22:52

Details of the blue screen?

Worth checking the BIOS is on the latest release.

darael · 13 May 2021 at 22:53

Andrew_McP said:
I'd watch someone else if I were you, I've got nowhere! Stripped it down to bare essentials (nothing plugged in, OC removed, only the C: drive connected) but after the initial boot successful boot & setup from USB, the following reboot ends up in blue screens and hanging and assorted technopoxation.

Tomorrow I should probably do a bit of Memtesting, just in case, but tonight it's Gremlins: 1, Andy McP: 0. Could be that there were hidden problems with this ancient system and 1909 worked happily by pure luck.

Which errors are you seeing? Any codes or drivers mentioned?

Something else which might help is to ensure the latest BIOS is installed.

Andrew_McP · 14 May 2021 at 22:06

STOP CODE: WHEA UNCORRECTABLE ERROR
Not a good one to have. My appetite for this kind of faff is low as I head towards senility. Next stop is reinstalling the backup that was working fine until I tried to upgrade for the umpteenth time. Thanks for your thoughts folks, will bear them in mind next time there's a rainy, miserable day which I feel like wasting staring at a non-functioning screen. :-)

bledd · 15 May 2021 at 09:04

Use the Microsoft media creation tool and create a USB drive for installation, DVD must take ages.

Update your bios to latest and off you go.

Do you have an SSD in this system? If not, get one. From USB installer boot to login screen screen should be under 15 mins.

Andrew_McP · 15 May 2021 at 09:58

bledd said:
Use the Microsoft media creation tool and create a USB drive for installation

Did do. But there's more to this than the Win10 installation now. Even Macrium Reflect can't manage to get all the way into restoring the previously working installation. That worked fine earlier in the week when I last did it to check things worked. I've done some experimenting with RAM stick removal and testing, and even tried to boot off a 2 year retired SSD which used to be the boot drive. That fails to get anywhere near desktop too.

STOP CODE: MACHINE CHECK EXCEPTION is its favourite crash error, and it locks rather than doing the 'we're collecting data' thing successfully.

I fear somewhere among the last fortnight or so of failed 20H upgrades & restores I've finally managed to trigger an error in this venerable -- and still very capable -- dinosaur of a system. Could be the iffy Intel chipset which was the reason the first batch of 2500K boards (like mine) were recalled. I may never know.

What annoys me most is that even though I rarely use that desktop any more, now I can't use it, I want to... even though it's problems like this which helped me settle happily into sofa slobbing on a laptop. It seems that no matter how hard I try to bury 30 years of PC building and problem solving, the urge to Make Stuff Work Again keeps clawing its way back to the surface. I probably need a stake and mallet or silver bullet to solve this curse, not a BIOS update for a 10 year old motherboard. :-)

Today I will problem solve in the greenhouse and garden instead. Nature soon papers over your mistakes for you. Tech just sulks in a corner until the landfill gods claim it.

darael · 15 May 2021 at 11:03

Andrew_McP said:
Did do. But there's more to this than the Win10 installation now. Even Macrium Reflect can't manage to get all the way into restoring the previously working installation. That worked fine earlier in the week when I last did it to check things worked. I've done some experimenting with RAM stick removal and testing, and even tried to boot off a 2 year retired SSD which used to be the boot drive. That fails to get anywhere near desktop too.

STOP CODE: MACHINE CHECK EXCEPTION is its favourite crash error, and it locks rather than doing the 'we're collecting data' thing successfully.

I fear somewhere among the last fortnight or so of failed 20H upgrades & restores I've finally managed to trigger an error in this venerable -- and still very capable -- dinosaur of a system. Could be the iffy Intel chipset which was the reason the first batch of 2500K boards (like mine) were recalled. I may never know.

What annoys me most is that even though I rarely use that desktop any more, now I can't use it, I want to... even though it's problems like this which helped me settle happily into sofa slobbing on a laptop. It seems that no matter how hard I try to bury 30 years of PC building and problem solving, the urge to Make Stuff Work Again keeps clawing its way back to the surface. I probably need a stake and mallet or silver bullet to solve this curse, not a BIOS update for a 10 year old motherboard.

Today I will problem solve in the greenhouse and garden instead. Nature soon papers over your mistakes for you. Tech just sulks in a corner until the landfill gods claim it.

What's the make and model of the motherboard and which BIOS is currently installed?

It's perfectly plausible that a BIOS update might be all the system needs.

MagicBoy · 15 May 2021 at 12:16

Or even a CMOS reset.

Dunno, OP seems more interested in things other than giving the forum enough information so we can help him do some problem determination.

Andrew_McP · 15 May 2021 at 15:20

MagicBoy said:
OP seems more interested in things other than giving the forum enough information so we can help him do some problem determination.

OP looks after his mother with advanced dementia, hasn't had an undisturbed night's sleep for 6 years, and has constantly shifting priorities. And while that's no excuse for anything (it's not the universe's problem I decided to be a one man care home) it's a factor in why I may struggle to get my debugging brain into gear, and why I may come across as an unsympathetic, rambling muppet.

However rain stopped play for garden chores today so I'm now typing from offending PC with a Linux Mint install which only made it to (SSD installed) desktop once I had -- as repeatedly advised -- looked into updating the BIOS updates available.

Motherboard: MSI P67A-GD65
Old BIOS: E7681IMS V1.8B1 31/12/2010
'New' BIOS: E7681IMS V1.19 (?) 07/03/2012 <-- ? guessing it means 1.9

There are more recent BIOSes, but they extract to an .exe which, I believe, is executed from within Windows, where I cannot get, for now. I've tested Borderlands2 for Linux without issues, run one cycle of Memtest ok, and the only problem I have at the moment is that the first time I reboot, everything hangs early in the BIOS boot. Second time, everything's fine. Filed under: eh? for now.

Plan of action: run Mint for a day or two to check stability, then wipe this and try the Win10 boot again. Thanks for the suggestions everyone.

Orcvader · 15 May 2021 at 15:40

Numbering wise 1.8 is actually something like 1 - 8th version, and 1.19 being 1 - 19th version.

If you google around there are ways to extract the BIOS from the exe file, I did have a quick try with 7-zip but sadly that didn't work. Apparently B2MB will be able to though.

Is everything running at stock speeds? Even tried turning off XMP on the RAM?

MagicBoy · 15 May 2021 at 18:15

Andrew_McP said:
OP looks after his mother with advanced dementia, hasn't had an undisturbed night's sleep for 6 years, and has constantly shifting priorities. And while that's no excuse for anything (it's not the universe's problem I decided to be a one man care home) it's a factor in why I may struggle to get my debugging brain into gear, and why I may come across as an unsympathetic, rambling muppet.

However rain stopped play for garden chores today so I'm now typing from offending PC with a Linux Mint install which only made it to (SSD installed) desktop once I had -- as repeatedly advised -- looked into updating the BIOS updates available.

Motherboard: MSI P67A-GD65
Old BIOS: E7681IMS V1.8B1 31/12/2010
'New' BIOS: E7681IMS V1.19 (?) 07/03/2012 <-- ? guessing it means 1.9

There are more recent BIOSes, but they extract to an .exe which, I believe, is executed from within Windows, where I cannot get, for now. I've tested Borderlands2 for Linux without issues, run one cycle of Memtest ok, and the only problem I have at the moment is that the first time I reboot, everything hangs early in the BIOS boot. Second time, everything's fine. Filed under: eh? for now.

Plan of action: run Mint for a day or two to check stability, then wipe this and try the Win10 boot again. Thanks for the suggestions everyone.

Thanks.

OP has my sympathies, I've been dealing with a parent who had a stroke a couple of months before lockdown started. It's not been fun the last 18 months...

bledd · 15 May 2021 at 18:47

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tIdj0i7AxCI

Don't need to do them from Windows. This may help

Let's keep this thread on track gents.

To me it sounds like ram issues tbh..

Andrew_McP · 15 May 2021 at 23:05

Orcvader said:
Is everything running at stock speeds? Even tried turning off XMP on the RAM?

I'll investigate the RAM but the only setting I've ever changed (I like a simple life!) is the 'OC' button on the board shifting it up to a nice comfortable 4.2GHz. It's back to stock for the time being and XMP is disabled in that config.

MagicBoy said:
Thanks.
I've been dealing with a parent who had a stroke

It has been an 'interesting' year or so to be dealing with health issues.

bledd said:
To me it sounds like ram issues tbh..

It was the first thing I checked, taking it down to one stick of RAM (it has 2x4 and 2x2 paired in 1,3 & 2,4), swapped the single stick, put them all back and ran Memtest OK. But it''ll cost nothing to give it a longer 'MOT'.

This evening I've used Rufus (how could I forget about that option, used it before several times) and tried the later BIOSes. All fail to load, complaining about ROM incompatibility. I suspect this un-RMAed board has a chipset those later versions don't expect to see... because, why would anyone not have used the free swap to the corrected hardware? Apart from someone too lazy to rebuild the PC again at the time.

I've also wiped Mint and am now typing from 20H2, which installed first time. And during the reboots for install and update, the PC didn't lock up early in the BIOS boot, every other time, as it had been doing during the Mint period.

Temporarily things seem to be ok. It is, however, early days. But hats off to all those who kept poking me with the BIOS stick... it's definitely helped.

Edit for posterity: system has been rock solid stable with 20H2 for 36 hours of assorted benchmarking/stressing now. If I'm honest, that's probably more stable than it's been for years! Not that I left it on for more than few hours very often, but when I did, I'd sometimes come back to a frozen system.