Installed new CPU and Mobo and now won't boot!

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10 Feb 2012
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Lord have mercy on my god damn soul!
Every month i have a new friggin problem with my computer!

What wrong with mine today you ask,. Well i had a phenom II x4,. and an old gigabyte mobo with a GTX 770.
It was getting bottlenecked so i upgraded!

I bought a asRock z77 mobo and an i7 3770k.
Installed it all just now,. along with gtx 770 etc,.. BUT as soon as i start it up,. it begins to do the windows animation and freezes. blue screens and restarts and then asks for "start normally" (where it just does the same again) or "Repair" where it fails to find a solution and tells me t shut down.

What can i do?
 
Hi,

Is the PC trying to boot into an installation of windows that was present when you had your old motherboard and CPU?

The reason I ask is that the OS may be freaking out as you've change the motherboard and CPU and so will fail to boot.

Of course if you're using a fresh install of windows then this won't be the case, but it's something I've experienced before.
 
try to boot to BIOS with only RAM, CPU in, possibly on integrated graphics.

but I'd suspect the same as above, that you're using HDD with the previous Windows install.
 
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backup your files and do a fresh install then.

I don't have anywhere to back my files up,. and i can't reinstall all my programs and games AGAIN! this happened like 2 moths ago,. my hard drive needing restarting. How can something as simple as an upgrade require me to completely wipe my drive.

Is there a way to put a different hard drive in,. install windows and then put my main hard drive in later and change some settings or something?
 
Have you tried switching your drive from ata to achi mode or visa versa? Worth a shot if it bsods straight after post and restarts.
 
I don't have anywhere to back my files up,. and i can't reinstall all my programs and games AGAIN! this happened like 2 moths ago,. my hard drive needing restarting. How can something as simple as an upgrade require me to completely wipe my drive.

Is there a way to put a different hard drive in,. install windows and then put my main hard drive in later and change some settings or something?

You don't need to format a disk drive to reinstall windows. Just reinstall windows on the drive, choose not to format and the windows installation will tell you that your existing data will be moved to a folder called windows.old.
 
Boot from the Windows installation disc and choose repair...sometimes it will rebuild all the driver directories etc....its because the windows install is seeing such a huge change in hardware and basically thinking its been plugged into the wrong PC
 
I heard that you could boot in the windows in safe mode and unnistall all old drivers the athlon and the mobo and boot normaly and install the new ones
Its worth a shot
 
Changing motherboard is a huge issue from a Windows point of view, and changing from AMD to Intel is an even bigger issue as they both work fundamentally differently - think of it like moving to a new house at the other end of the country, you can't complain because your normal route and number of steps to the corner shop now doesn't get you to your new one!

Depending on just how incompatible your outgoing and incoming motherboard are, there is a chance you might be able to fudge your current Windows installation into actually booting, but as the others have said, I would STRONGLY advise against this. Bite the bullet and install a fresh Windows now (as Spoffle said, you don't need to format and lose your documents) and you will save yourself a lot of hassle later.

I repaired a PC for a friend of friend when the motherboard died in his 6 year old High Street Shop special offer PC. It wasn't possible to replace like for like, so I put in a new motherboard and reused all his other parts as he wanted to keep costs to a minimum. I stressed to him I needed to install Windows, but he flatly refused as he didn't want "the hassle" of reinstalling his programs. I got the PC booting eventually using some of the tools on Hiren's Boot CD, but told him this would be temporary and it would need a fresh Windows. A few weeks later he contacted me and complained that it was blue screening sometimes, generally wasn't very reliable, and he wasn't happy. I reminded him about reinstalling Windows and asked him then if I could do it, but again he thought that was a lot of hassle and inconvenience and felt there must be something else I can do - so I told him I could try a repair install, but I wouldn't expect it to be much better. Few more hours of my time and he had his PC back, slightly better but still not as stable as I expect a PC to be. A month later I found out on the grapevine that he'd bought 2 brand new iMac's for him and his wife (!) and was spreading the word that I couldn't repair PCs properly and had left him with a poorly working computer that I didn't know how to fix. Some people! :rolleyes:

Anyway, the moral of my little ramble is for such a major change as you've done, you really are better off setting Windows up from scratch. In the long run it is actually less hassle than trying to run with an existing Windows install, and there are very few things more frustrating than an unstable or unreliable PC. As wise men say, do a job properly, and you'll only do it once. :)
 
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