well, crap

[hackentosher]

So I have had one hell of a weekend with my hack that had been working fine for about 8 months straight. I had been leaving my machine on for a few days (very bad practice, I know) and this saturday it froze up while just browsing the internet. Like a bad freeze where you can't even move the mouse.
I tried a hard shut down, reboot, and I got the little progress bar that checks all of your files to make sure nothing was corrupted after the hard shut down. So it goes through the whole thing fine, but when it finishes the scan and looks like it is about to continue on its merry way and boot up, it shuts down. Fans off, cold shut down. It doesn't restart, it just sits there until I try again. It doest the exact same thing.

After wiping the hard drive, I went through my boot disk to reinstall mac OSX. It freezes at about 30% through the install. Hard shut down, try again, same result. The only thing I can think of that would be wrong wrong with it is the motherboard (gigabyte b75m-d3p) I really don't have the $350 to get a new, decent motherboard and a cpu to go with it (I am broke as hell XD). Please help!

 

[hackentosher]

I was just poking around the forums and saw that a lot of people were using the clover boot loader instead of chimeara. Does anyone have any insight as to wether or not this would help? Another possibility in my mind is that the platters in my hard drive have been damaged, but I don't think that is the case. Any help is welcome! Thanks.

 

[wavesequence]

Have you checked if a RAM stick is corrupt?
In the past I had random freezes with my second build GA-H55M-UD2H - i7 870 - Radeon HD 5770 due to a faulty memory module. I extensively used MemTest, until I found the faulty one.

It's unlike your HD had problems, you should have it thrown out the window.

 

[hackentosher]

I tried a couple installs fedora, but they were never stable. I did manage to get a stable installation of Ubuntu on a WD drive I had in the computer for dual booting in the future. I am going to check today if my Segate boot drive is damaged.

 

[hackentosher]

Another update, I picked up a kingston hyperx ssd, and a fancy new segate 1tb drive. The segate had the same trouble as the old one, and the ssd would install and make it to the first boot, but would freeze when asked to reboot. I had a pretty stable instal of Ubuntu on a WD drive, but that got progressively less stable to the point where Chrome wouldn't stay open for more than 30 seconds. I tried to reinstall that, but something was screwing with the installer and would not even let that launch.

After talking to some IT friends, I think I have narrowed it down to my POS motherboard, potentially a sata controller that is out of whack. Basically, my only option is to replace it.

I am thinking about using a gigabyte z97x ud3h, an i5 4670k, and a gigabyte gtx 760, along with my corsair vengence ram, cx600m psu, nzxt phantom 410, and corsair h80i. Does anyone know of any compatibility issues I might face with this new setup? Thanks a lot everyone!