Windows 10 Reinstall Questions

biggles

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Jul 25, 2005
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1. If I choose a reinstall that deletes all programs but keeps user documents and does not reformat the hard drive, is this considered a "fresh" reinstall? Is this sufficient to solve most blue screen problems?
2. When doing a reinstall in which the hard drive gets reformatted, does one need to setup the bios to boot to usb flash drive or optical drive as priority over the internal hard drive? In that case either the usb flash drive or optical drive would have the Windows install files.
3. When getting randomly occurring blue screens (about once per week), is a fresh Windows reinstall a good option? I have previously tried the following to resolve:
*updated all hardware drivers,
*Windows OS fully updated,
*antivirus scans,
*removed 3rd party antivirus,
*ran Glary utilities,
*replaced ram
*replaced hard drive

I am thinking perhaps there is some sort of Windows event logger that can isolate/define the problem.
 
look in event viewer see what it says. also the bsod error message might help narrow it down. might not be time to rebuild yet.
 
your ram probably isn't stable. test it and or bump the voltage 0.1v. also, it may sound odd but test and or replace your cmos battery. youre running a z97 and I have one here that was acting weird with a dying cmos battery. there are also several threads around here(other z97s and 87s) with random issues that were fixed with a new batt.
 
are you sure that is not hardware related? did you try a SFC?
Here is the result after running SFC:
Windows Resource Protection found corrupt files but was unable to fix some of them.
For online repairs, details are included in the CBS log file located at
windir\Logs\CBS\CBS.log.
What should be done next?

Also, I checked device manager and did not see any ! symbols. So it does not appear to be a driver issue.
 
One more thing, I also ran Windows Memory Diagnostic Tool, no errors found.
 
Microsoft support site mentions this about SFC, step 3 is the one I noticed in particular. Have you tried that by any chance?

System File Checker is a utility in Windows 10 that checks for problems with files on your computer. To run it, follow these steps:

  • Make sure you've installed the latest updates for Windows 10, and then restart your machine. To find out more, read Update Windows 10.
  • In the search box on the taskbar, type Command Prompt, and right-click or press and hold Command Prompt (Desktop app) from the list of results. Select Run as administrator, and then select Yes.
  • Type DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth (note the space before each "/"), and then press Enter. (Note: This step may take a few minutes to start and up to 30 minutes to complete.)
  • After you see a message that says "The operation completed successfully," type sfc /scannow (note the space between "sfc" and "/") and press Enter.
  • After you see a message that says, "Verification 100% complete," type exit.
 
Good news. I took Ironwolf's advice to run dism and then SFC. The first time did not appear to work. SFC gave the same error message. Ran them both again. After the 2nd run, SFC said "Windows Resource Protection found corrupt files and successfully repaired them." Fingers crossed that this will solve future blue screen problems. Thanks all for the advice.
 
If you have random bluescreens in my experience memory, hard drive and PSU are the most common culprits. For example if your PSU goes unstable, your overclocks will get unstable also, often slowly but progressively. Oh and that brings me to the first rule of thumb when troubleshooting unstability:

- Reset all overclocking settings before any test

I had a gaming computer that around 4 years of age started becoming unstable. I had to drop the OC little by little and eventually it wasn't stable even at stock settings anymore. I thought I had burned the CPU and nearly replaced the mobo/cpu but luckily I had a spare PSU to test. And with the new PSU I could go full OC again.
 
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