PC boots inconsistently, then randomly crashes and refuses to boot until 20 attempts or so, even after fresh windows install.
About two years ago I built my own PC. With great difficulty and suffering: my tech skills are mediocre and I hack through things with a lot of googling and trial and error. But it worked without issue for two years. The specs are
Motherboard: TUF Gaming X570-PLUS (WI-FI)
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600X 6-Core processor
Graphics: Radeon HD 7850
RAM: Two G-Skill 16 Gig
I carried over my 1T SSD running windows 8.1 from my previous computer, since I didn't feel like getting a new computer of having to update my version of windows since I was reasonably happy, and I had a 3T secondary drive for backup space, and I bought a 8T drive for more space when that filled, but for some reason my computer failed to let me access it, and I never figured out why, so it sat dormant.
Yesterday, my PC suddenly crashed in the middle of a game. I have no idea why, I have not made any meaningful changes to hardware, drivers, or any sort of system stuff in a very long time, and I've played that game many times before. When it tried to boot, it did a spinny thing and said windows failed to load, and it failed to automatically fix it.
After trying a bunch of things that didn't work to fix it, I was able to boot it in safe mode. I backed up my important files, and decided this was a good opportunity to finally upgrade to windows 11. Which failed and said my pc doesn't have good enough specs for, so I tried windows 10. The bios and the windows installation thumb drive I made did recognize my 8 TB drive, so I installed there in order to not lose my files. It worked, I setup my windows account, and it seemed okay.
Notably though, it refused to recognize my graphics card. I restarted the PC several times and it booted correctly about half the time, while complaining about being unable to start the other half. After booting, I tried downloading drivers for the graphics card, and mid install the PC crashed and refused to boot for many restarts. I reinstalled Windows 10 from scratch and it booted just fine, and I restarted it a few times and it worked every time, until it suddenly crashed again and refused to boot until I tried like 20 times and then it worked again, and has worked for several restarts.
At this point, my biggest suspect is the Motherboard, not because I have any idea of why it's doing this, but simply because I'm using a completely different hard drive and windows installation, so I don't know what else it could be. But if anyone has any insight, or tests I can do to better troubleshoot this issue, I would appreciate it. I don't want to buy a brand new motherboard and have to reseat all my hardware if I don't have to and if that won't actually fix my problem, but I'll do what I have to if that is the solution.