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System won't boot to W10 (even USB, WinPE, WinRE)
Hi All,
I bought an old, but in good condition Dell Inspiron 560 for cheap off some people who had recently purchased a new machine. I thought I'd use it as a sort of test system while studying for my CompTIA A+ exam. First thing I did was upgrade the BIOS so I could put a better CPU in it, and then I also upgrade the RAM. I also installed a 120GB SSD and kept the old 750GB installed for storage purposes. Additionally, I installed a new PSU. The system originally came installed with W7, but had been upgraded to W10 when Microsoft forced it upon everybody. I upgraded it further to W10 Pro since I wanted to play around with Hyper-V. I followed Kari's tutorial on moving the User's Directory to my storage drive to free up space on the SSD and to help the system boot up faster. Everything at this point worked fine.
However, a couple of weeks ago I started receiving some SMART errors on boot up, so I purchased a new HDD to replace the one currently in the system (the drive with the User's Directory). I installed it a few days ago and performed a clean install of Windows 10 Pro Fall Creator's (1709) edition. I did the same procedure as before and installed Windows on the SSD while moving the User's Directory to the new HDD. This time, however, I've encountered some boot problems. I originally thought maybe I messed up somewhere in the process of moving the User's Directory to the HDD, so I redid it. Unfortunately, the boot issues still exist.
Basically, the computer boots up to the Dell Splash screen and the "loading" bar either gets all the way to the end of about halfway and then the computer reboots, and then ultimately ends up in a reboot cycle. Periodically, it will make it to the Automatic Repair screen, but then reboots before completing. And then, sometimes it makes it through the repair process and tells me Windows could not repair the problem. Rarely, it will even make it all the way to the login screen, I will login, and everything works normally.
I was initially able to enable boot logging and in the log file I noticed numerous "not_loaded" errors that seem to be related the driver loading process. Unfortunately, I failed to save the text file to a USB drive when I had the chance and now I can't get back to it (I will keep trying). I've since tried to boot in to Safe Mode and use various options under Troubleshooting in the W10 Recovery Environment, but every time I try to run one of the options the computer reboots. I have even tried booting to my W10 USB drive, but the computer reboots when I tried to boot from it as well. I've used two tools to make a W10 USB drive (Rufus and Media Creation Tool), but it doesn't seem to make a difference.
I've tried various other troubleshooting methods including running the built-in Dell Diagnostics (everything passed), taking out the new RAM and using the old RAM that originally came in the system, unplugging the storage drive and just leaving the System Drive plugged in, replacing the CMOS battery, verbose boot mode, reset BIOS/Cleared CMOS, etc. I've come to the conclusion that it's likely some sort of hardware compatibility problem.
On a whim, I tried a Linux Live USB and it booted perfectly. I then made a W7 Install USB using Rufus and it booted just fine as well. This pretty much makes it seems like it's something specifically with W10. I plan on trying to install an older edition of W10 to see if it works. Haven't done so yet, though.
(Other Notes: I created my W10 USB in Rufus using "MBR partition scheme for BIOS or UEFI-CSM" since it is an older system, but it still doesn't work. The System Drive (SSD) is plugged into the SATA 0 port. Boot sequence in BIOS is correct. I even disabled booting from everything but the system drive.)
Anyone have any ideas on what I might try to get this system working with W10? I'm at a loss.
Thanks