Question PC stuck in a boot loop after changing cases. Ive tried EVERYTHING, am i missing something obvious?

[marcoboyle]

So Im desperate for help. My PC was running hot, and i remembered that i had a massive coolermaster storm case in my loft from years ago and decided to change it over to use that for the increase airflow and have more fans as the current case was a tiny tiny compact one. So i change everything over and it gets stuck in a boot loop now. I cannot get to the bottom of it and am loosing my mind here.


System is :

Ryzen 7600cpu, Gigabyte B650M K, 16gigs (2 sticks) of HyperX 5600mhz ram

are the main parts.


I changed my 120mm aio and put back on the wraith stealth cooler to see what kind of temps that gives as the aio is old and was getting a bit gurgly so i assumed it had lost some coolant volume. doesnt matter still have the wraith stealth to try. But i get this boot loop where i see the BIOS splash screen then restart. i left it wondering if it was doing expo set up, or memory timing, or auto overclocks etc but it never ends. So i started taking out parts that could be effecting it.

I have:

changed power supply,

Disconnected extra fans and front panel,

disconnected any superfluous peripherals, and other connections,

took out ram sticks,

swapped ram slots, used each of the single sticks,

took out the gpu,

checked, reseated, repasted the cpu cooler,

checked all connections,

took out the sata hard drive and the m.2

hit the bios reset switch on the back of the io panel,

took the cmos batter out for 5-10 mins ans shorted the cmos jumpers,

checked for grounding or shorting issues from the case,

everything i can think of. I now have just the motherboard, with 1 stick of ram, and the power supply siting on a box and when i boot it up, it still boot loops. So it seems like its either motherboard or cpu somehow. When i hit DEL to enter bios i always get a message about the BIOS resetting and any options i change in the bios and save and restart dont seem to take effect when i next go into the bios - i get the same message and everything reset again. does ANYone have ANY suggestions as to what could be the issue? im open to anything. even hail mary wild ridiculous suggestions.

 

[In2Photos]

Edit.

Did you reseat the CPU?

Since you can get to the BIOS this could be a hard drive issue? What is your boot drive? Does it show up in the BIOS?

 

[In2Photos]

You could try flashing the BIOS. Maybe it got corrupted somehow?

 

[marcoboyle]

Edit.

Did you reseat the CPU?

Since you can get to the BIOS this could be a hard drive issue? What is your boot drive? Does it show up in the BIOS?

I have not tried to reseat the cpu as it was locked in the whole time, i havent moved it (or even touched it) other than to clean off old thermal paste, but at this point i will try anything.

i have a crucial bx500 sata ssd which my windows was on, but i also have an m.2 with an old install of windows 10 on it and it wont work with that either. in fact, even without a drive in it, it still does the splash screen, then reboots if i dont press DEL to get into the bios. even without a drive attached, same thing. tried my default windows drive on another pc there and it works fine - in fact thats how im talking to you now - using that drive with that windows on another machine. I've tried changing around the boot devices, and using three different usb boot devices - al get seen by the bios, but none can load as the computer restarts after 5 or so seconds every time i power it on (unless i get into the BIOS at which point i get a message about the bios being reset andi can make changes in there, but nothing sticks.

So def no dice on the hard drive front, but thank you for the suggestions. I shall reseat the cpu and see how it goes!

 

[marcoboyle]

You could try flashing the BIOS. Maybe it got corrupted somehow?

trying that now. ive never used q flash plus but this motherboard has it so it seems like it will be simple to just extract it on a usb, put it in the q flash usb port and press the button but we will see how it goes. have you got any experience using q flash? im wondering how i will know if its worked if i use the q flash plus method that doesnt require the pc to be powered on.

 

[marcoboyle]

So after trying a bunch of times to get the bios updates it wont seem to update. ive ran it three times now and it doesnt seem to work. went through the process, chose the bios file, it verified it was correct, then said it was going to reboot, but then when it does, it just sits there fans spining but no output. which is different to the ususal, lights come on, fans spin up then cycle off and on repeatedly. but if i manually turn it off (after 20 mins of the bios update supposedly happening) and manually start it back up it will do the cycle thing again. and if i go into the system information the bios hasnt applied. im at a loss at this point.

 

[bba-tcg]

Since you changed cases, make sure there's not a spurious standoff under the motherboard someplace it shouldn't be.

 

[marcoboyle]

Since you changed cases, make sure there's not a spurious standoff under the motherboard someplace it shouldn't be.

good shout, i did check for that and any potential shorts that could cause such a thing. Its been out the case and sitting on the a box with just a power supply connected and doing the same thing so at least thats ruled out. Tried another power supply with it sitting on a book as well and same thing. seems to be narrowed down to a motherboard issue or maybe somehow the cpu? i checked that as well and not weirdly suddenly bent pins or any issues that are obvious. tried to update the bios and that doesnt seem to be taking eihter so im out of ideas completely

 

[bba-tcg]

Then my guess would be the motherboard.

 

[tcsenter]

You didn't by chance knock off a jumper pin cap while handling/changing (if it had any in place to begin with)?

 

[marcoboyle]

You didn't by chance knock off a jumper pin cap while handling/changing (if it had any in place to begin with)?

I'm not sure tbh, but I like the suggestion it's thinking outside the box. Any ideas of how I could tell? There's a reset jumper and a clear CMOS jumper but I don't believe they had a cap on then before.

For it to be causing this, the jumper cap would have to be making contact, and the cap being off would have to mean the jumper being open would cause it to continually reset? It sounds like the inverse of how it should work but I kind of could see how it could cause that reset boot loop to happen if something had changed with a reset jumper

 

[tcsenter]

Yes there would have to be jumper pins on the board where the default operating position is to be shorted. That is increasingly uncommon these days but used to be fairly common several years ago.

Perhaps you've been struck by the quite rare but definitely possible phenomenon of damaging errant static discharge? It's been hot in many regions the past couple weeks. Our house is dry as a bone from running the air conditioning more than usual, in a region where humidity is already pretty low during the summer.