Hi,

Lately I have been experiencing an endless spinning wheel when I start Windows before I can see the desktop. For almost a year everything had been working pretty good considering I was able to coffee lake mod my Z270 Apex IX board to work with a 9700K cpu. Was able to play games and work with the machine without issues but one day a few months ago Windows failed to boot up. The wheel would spin endlessly after bios passed control to the boot loader. I might have experimented with memory overclocking at best but left the cpu running at stock voltages set at 1.30 volts. The actual bios I used was made by a modder known as Dsanke. 

Anyhow so after the first time this happened I reinstalled Windows and was ok for a month. This time setting ram to XMP stock settings. Then it happened again. Even automatic repair failed to fix the problem but was able to recover by using the Windows install stick to 'Repair my computer'. After it did its thing I saw that it said something like 'Failed Windows update removed' and was able to boot back into windows again. So I tried to turn off Windows update and did a 7 day pause after a couple updates sneaked by me. Thats the best Windows settings offers and was good for another week and it happened again the other day. This time the Windows install stick repair computer routine could not repair or even uninstall updates. Not even sure if updates were at fault but had to restore a backup to get it going again. Have a dual boot Macrium partition I installed the last time this happened just in case. Restoring a backup takes like two minutes.

Only thing is now my motherboard audio is making popping and crackling sounds randomly. Not sure if its related. Not sure what to do next. Ready to chalk it up to experience and fun while it lasted and get a real Z390 board maybe. The CPU is under extended two year warranty at Microcenter. Was an open box item. Thinking of maybe just going Z490 but would have to sell the 9700K. Luckily the Apex board was like $60 investment at the time.

Next thinking of Stress testing it. Got to get a better virus scanner maybe but not sure if its a virus or something else. Could be a bad Windows update or just data corruption occuring. 

How can I tell? 

Thanks

What XMP ram do you have?

Set to 3200 MHz. Dual rank 2 x 16gb. Think I have set the Vccio and Vccsa to 1.18-1.2 volts each. Specs:

 

Asus Apex IX Z270 Dsanke mod running 9700K cpu
Gskill 2x16gb 3200 MHz ram Cas 14.
Msi 2080 Trio videocard
Killer AX1650 network WiFi card
WD Sn750 nvme drive
WD 750 U.2 / WD 750 pci-e soft raided together
Two Intel Sata SSD raided together MB Intel raid
WD black mechanical data drive

I think its only os corrupted, check your ssd health and temp. Try run memtest at xmp.

Edited May 25, 20206 yr by speed.fastest