Had a strange one come into the office yesterday. A very nice gaming computer was having some issue and the owner wanted it reload. Seemed straight forward enough but little did I know I would be still working on it several hours later and after 3 am.
Where everything went sideways was after the second reboot during the install. The BIOS screen would flash and then the Windows loading balls would start to spin. After the 3rd spin they would stop and it was frozen.
After swapping memory around and trying new memory, attempting to install on 3 different hard drives, a M2, a SSD and a Sata with exactly the same results I was beginning to loose hope. I ran memtest and both the CPU and Memory all passed. I tried a different USB for installation and no matter what I did it froze in the same place everytime.
Finally I decided to install Ubuntu to see if I could get anything to install. It did. I reset the computer and had the Grub boot-loader ask me which OS i want to install too. For the heck of it I choose Windows and IT LOADED.
I was able to log into Windows and update it and restart. I still had to use Grub to get to it.
Finally I used EasyBCD to repair the MBR and in the bios choose the Windows SSD and now I boot into Windows as normal.
Not really sure why this worked but it must have had something to do with the Windows Boot Loader.
I was able to remove the Linux partition from Disk Management Console and enlarge the Windows partition back to full size.
Can’t promise this will work again, but if your stuck like me give it a try.