Win 10 clean install, PC crashes frequently

asteldian

asteldian

asteldian

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Hi all, hoping to get some help with an issue my brother's PC is happening. Unfortunately I am not overly savvy with software problem solving, no issue building/moving parts, but once a PC is up and running I am not so helpful. So if any explaining could be done with an idiot in mind, that would be appreciated!
Details:
i5 2500k
970 GTX
8gb Corsair XMS RAM (4x2gb)
AntecTruepower 650W
Asus P8P67 Pro (rev.1.01 according to board)

USB Win 10 Installer media (which is known to work as I created it and used it on two PC's within the last week)

So, his PC currently runs in Win 7 and has no issues at all. Decided to upgrade to Win 10 using a different HDD. I removed his HDD(Win7) and added an old but empty HDD and installed Win 10. Started to install things - Chrome,Skype, Steam, Nvidia Drivers. At any point during this it would crash. Tried a few times, crashes happen randomly but frequently. Decided maybe the HDD was faulty (it is old). Tried with another old HDD, same issue (also crashed once during set up)
Installed brand new 120gb SSD. Installed win 10, crashed during Cortana set up process, restarted and completed set up. Same issue as the HDD. Crashes constant, cannot even get far enough in a Steam verification process to play a game before crash.

Swapped out GPU with another 970 since I had it on hand and figured I would rule it out. Same issue of crashes.

Was going to do memtest, but since PC crashes so frequently that seemed pointless as I would be lucky to get as far as starting it before a crash will happen. But I did notice something odd -in Win 10, the System was stating 4gb RAM not 8gb. I took out the RAM and used 2 sticks instead of 4 and the 4gb still showed up (only now it is correct). Still crashed. I swapped around the sticks, still crashed. Swapped around slots used, no change. Tried two spare sticks, crashes continued.

I am at a loss on what to do. I am guessing, since everything works in Win 7, it is likely a Software problem rather than hardware (but went through all the above any way since it is the stuff I am most comfortable with) though the mystery of RAM only being recognised as 4gb does confuse me.

I see mention of Bios updates when doing some google searching, the P8P67 Pro is old and never been updated, but I am not overly comfortable doing it due to risk of total failure, and trying to be sure which board version I have and therefore the correct install I would need. If it must be done, any help on how to confirm board/correct software would be appreciated.

Otherwise, I guess one of the many drivers installed in Win 10 is the problem? Since it works in Win 7 it is the only thing I can think of, but not sure how to address this due to how frequent the crashes are.

Thanks for any help
 
These sort of things could be caused by a number of things even as simple as Windows 10/11 preferring GPT partitioned disks instead of MBR ones, but as you have tried a clean install with the Win10 USB, that would have done the partitioning anyway assuming the drive originally had no active partitions. Though that should apply to the 120GB SSD so there is that.

If you create a recovery media from another Windows 10 computer (it can be done on USB too), you can then boot up on this PC into safe mode using the recovery media and see if it crashes in safe mode when you're just using it to do random things. Might be worth booting into sfae mode with networking so you can open up STEAM etc too.

If safe mode works fine then you know it is a software thing and you can then install a fresh set of drivers as it will be down to an issue with one or more drivers.

Also in the BIOS there may be an option for the OS support in there, it is too old to show WIndows 10 in the dropdown, but if it's on then may be worth turning off and vice versa. It will be something along the lines of mode: Windows 7 / Windows 7 WHQL etc.
 
Are you definitely installing the 64 bit version of Windows?

Are you installing Windows hardware drivers for the motherboard etc before doing anything else?
 
Definitely 64 bit. Also a bit of fiddling in bios got the 8gb ram recognised.

Not sure best way to get drivers - win update has none in optional, device manager says all are up to date, though some have the exclamation mark (pci simple communications controller) but it is unknown manufacturer so not sure how to get a driver.

So far in safe mode I managed to verify a game in steam (in normal windows this has never happened before crashing and forcing the process to restart)

So it looks likely a driver issue, I just dont know how to resolve it
 
asteldian said:
though some have the exclamation mark (pci simple communications controller) but it is unknown manufacturer so not sure how to get a driver.
Click to expand...

Try using the Windows 7 driver. Failing that, look at the device properties and click on the Details tab. Then select Hardware IDs from the Property drop-down. Plug each of those in turn into your favourite search engine and you should find a driver from the links.

But really, if Windows 7 was working, why did you upgrade?
 
I think bitdriver updated the pci communication. As far as I am aware all drivers are up to date.
As for moving to Win 10, it is getting to the point where some games will not run on Win 7 (Lost Ark for example)
 
I have just checked the Asus site for your mobo and the only driver Asus have under Windows 10 is the onboard audio driver, nothing for chipset etc. That's pretty lame really and may well explain why you are having issues on Windows 10. That board just isn't compatible it seems since there are no chipset drivers for it.

There are however Windows 8.1 drivers which typically would work on Windows 10 as well (same driver model), so you could give them a go. I would go with these:

From: https://www.asus.com/SupportOnly/P8P67_PRO/HelpDesk_Download/

Order:
1: Chipset, then reboot
2: SATA, then reboot

The rest are just LAN etc which Widows will have the drivers for anyway.
 
Thanks, I'll give that a go. Looking at various sites it seems people have had this board and older work fine on windows 10, so must be some solution, hopefully these may help
 
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