Windows 10 not installing to computer; freezes at windows logo

Question

I have a gaming PC I built in about 2015. I recently performed some upgrades including new corsair vengeance 32gb RAM, MSI 2070 graphics card and swapped out the original 1TB hard drive to a new Samsung EVO 1TB SSD. I cloned the hard drive data to the new SSD. The computer worked great for about 2 weeks, until it did not boot up. I tried performing system restore, repair, etc. and could not get working. I eventually wiped the SSD clean and attempted a fresh install of windows 10. I installed windows 10 onto a USB using the media creation tool on the windows website. When I boot the computer from the USB, I go through the installation wizard, click on the SSD for windows to be installed on and it installs. When the computer restarts for the first time, the windows logo comes up. There are a few messages; "getting ready, setting up, etc". Then the windows logo comes up with a loading screen with spinning dots and the computer freezes here. I cannot get past this point. I have updated the BIOS to the latest version (GIGABYTE Z170-HD3) of f22f. I have tried booting in legacy and UEFI modes; no change. I tried installing multiple times, every times performing the clean command in diskpart as the windows USB creates the partitions on the SSD.

Any information will help. Thank you!

Answer 1

Cloning hard drives doesn't really work well with Windows since about 7. Windows uses hardware information, I've heard, such that cloning doesn't fool it into thinking it is the same drive anymore. It will generally require that you reactivate Windows at a minimum. The other issue is that the ARP paths may be different which generally prevents booting at all. However you wiped the SDD after it didn't work so this most likely isn't the issue. If you've never really successfully gotten Windows run successfully on the drive then perhaps the drive itself is bad. My first recommendation would be to swap to a different drive and see if you can get the machine running stable.

You mentioned you swapped the memory which is generally safe, assuming your BIOS profile settings weren't customized. If it were bad memory then I'd expect a BSOD. The graphics card swap should be fine as well assuming you stick to the same brand. If you switch from nVidia to AMD or vice versa then old drivers cause problems. But if you wiped Windows and started over that seems unlikely as well.

If swapping out drives doesn't resolve the issue then I'd start looking at the memory next. If you can get Windows to boot at least once in a while then enabling boot logging would be the way to go. But unless you can remote debug from another machine then not getting into Windows would prevent you from enabling boot logging.

Answer 2

I finally got it. It was settings in bios. First I reset bios to optimized default options. Then tried everything in legacy. Did not work. Then tried everything in UEFI; it did something different, but still didn’t load. I turned off fast boot, and one other setting I forget but I will find. I restarted and miraculously windows finished the download.