1w ago

Can't boot into Windows at all after moving to a new case

I got a new AIO cooler and needed to also move to a bigger desktop case.

So I moved all of my internal components from one case to the other and also removed the old AIO and installed the new one. Besides that, I might have damaged my PSU in the process so I had to replace that too. It wouldn’t turn on anymore so I just replaced it this morning.

I tried booting into Windows and it went to a BSOD saying cache_manager was the problem.

I tried to get a recovery in there and Windows tried to automatically repair drives but kept coming up on this same error.

I created a KDE Neon live USB and booted into that. Zero issues. I then manually formatted my Windows OS disk in KDE and also removed the Windows bootloader. Basically trying to start from a scratch system with no Microsoft any.

Still getting the BSOD, even with the Windows 11 USB installer I created from their creation tool. I am able to get to that purple screen in the installer and see a cursor to move around with my mouse. That’s the part in the Windows installer where you tell it what edition and which drive you want to choose. But after a few moments, it errors out to a BSOD.

Now I’ve actually went ahead and installed KDE Neon to my system. I use it on my laptop, but I need Windows on this computer for work (it’s my personal computer I game with but also use for remoting in for work).

I’m going to try redoing my USB as a new Windows 11 installer and see if that goes through, but wondering if there’s anything else I can do for this? Anything else to try?

4 comments

That's a troubling state! My first guess would be your system memory being not great seated, which Linux handles more gratefully.
Do you see any errors in the Linux log?
- Where can I access that log? I haven’t encountered any issues on the surface in Linux but haven’t dug into any logs.
  Thanks for your comment!
  Edit: sorry, I’m still learning Linux.
  But I checked journalctl and not seeing any obvious errors.
  What kind of errors might I see that would be related to this?
  
  journalctl is usually the way yes, you can also check dmesg if it's part of your distro. Errors are usually highlighted in red, that's something to scan for. You can use journalctl -ef to keep the log updating on your screen, if the issue is intermittent, it might take a bit before it shows up. If the issue is logged on boot, it should be in journalctl -b
  Does htop/free show the correct amount of memory?
  Also try applying load on the system, maybe it's a thermal or power delivery issue.
  Do you have a overclock enabled in your bios? Try disabling that and XMP if enabled.
  
  Thank you so much for your help.
  So this morning I ended up deleting all my drives. I have 4 different SSDs/HDD in my system and I originally figured I would just delete the OS SSD and then let Windows discover the other drives once Windows was reinstalled. I realized last night it’s just mostly games I can redownload so I went ahead and deleted every partition in Linux this morning. Thankfully Linux helped me move over everything that was actually important before deleting.
  Then I went and tried the Windows installer again and now it works.
  I have added all my drives except one. I get an I/O error when trying to add it in. I’m guessing this was my culprit all along. And I remember that I did do something to this drive when setting up everything yesterday which was add a cover over top of it to help with cooling. I’m not sure if this has any impact, maybe I damaged it or something. But I’m not too worried about losing it.
  Thank you so much for your help! I truly appreciate it.