Win11 Installation Freezes or Restarts PC after 1 minute

[ChuckV]

MOBO: MSI B550 Tomahawk
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5800G
RAM: Corsair Vengeance 16GB 3600MHz (4 sticks, reduced to 1 stick for install)
PSU: Rosewill Hive1000S
SSD: WD Black sn850x 2TB

I built the pc, over a year ago and it's run great the whole time. I have an SSD with Win11 already installed, that boots up perfectly fine, so I assume that hardware is as good as it has been for the last year. I tried upgrading the storage drive and also getting another copy of win11 to install on that. But the installation is giving me trouble.

I've tried searching for answers and i've tried a lot of different solutions, no thing has worked so far. I've tried installing windows install media from different methods (media creation tool and rufus), different devices, different USB drives (2.0 and 3.0), different USB ports. I've tried resetting cmos, updating bios, take off gpu and display out via CPU and MOBO, various ram configurations reduced to 1 on 2nd slot, tried using 3 different SSDs, checked bios settings, tried plugging mouse and keyboard into different usb ports.

I chatted with microsoft support, as soon as they found out it was a custom build, they told me it sounds like a drivers issue and to contact manufacture support.
I chatted with MSI support, they turned me away because it's a custom build and outside of their support hours for builds, then they followed up with an email that gave a few ideas:
-make new bootable device or use another flash drive for install
-reset CMOS
-update BIOS
-reset the storage device or use another storage device

but I had already tried all of those, with no success

i've made another USB with drivers following a youtube video, but that video showed that the drivers were added after the install, so i'm confused by this 1 minute timer before the PC freezes or restarts (usually freezes). I believe there's an opportunity to add drivers at the time of choosing what storage device to install on.

 

[ChuckV]

also, i'll add that i've used linux a little bit in the past, i'm willing to give it a try just to help me rule out whether it's a hardware problem or not. Does anybody have any recommendations for a beginner friendly distro that's decent for gaming? Should I give the latest Ubuntu a try?

 

[citay]

so, I started to think maybe it is a hardware problem, so I swapped back to the SSD w/ Win11 that works, and it's still working wonderfully without freezing or crashing.

Like i last suggested: It needs to be ruled out by trying with a different drive, but otherwise the same procedure with the same Windows installation USB stick etc.

We know that your Kingston drive with the existing Win11 on it makes it work. And the 1TB WD is now in use in another PC. So you need to borrow/source another SSD to try the fresh Win11 install with, the same way you've been doing all the time when it lead to freezes/reboots. Or you could put your 2TB WD into another PC and try the Win11 install there, but that will be less telling. The best test about the SSD would be to use a different SSD on this PC, but otherwise doing nothing different.

 

[ChuckV]

Like i last suggested: It needs to be ruled out by trying with a different drive, but otherwise the same procedure with the same Windows installation USB stick etc.

We know that your Kingston drive with the existing Win11 on it makes it work. And the 1TB WD is now in use in another PC. So you need to borrow/source another SSD to try the fresh Win11 install with, the same way you've been doing all the time when it lead to freezes/reboots. Or you could put your 2TB WD into another PC and try the Win11 install there, but that will be less telling. The best test about the SSD would be to use a different SSD on this PC, but otherwise doing nothing different.

I've been trying to reinstall even on the Kingston SSD that currently boots into win11, just to see if it's the installation media. It freezes or restarts with the Kingston SSD or either of the WD Black SSDs (1TB or 2TB). So, I haven't seen any reason to rule out any of the SSDs. Any of them are detected, they pass tests in BIOS. So to clarify, the boot media freezes or restarts my PC even with the good SSD plugged in. I bet it would even freeze or restart the PC without any SSD plugged in.

I'm currently cloning Win11 from the Kingston SSD to the 2TB WD Black SSD, and if that works, then i'll change the product key to the new key. Hoping this is the best solution.

I had also found older windows ISOs for win11 and win10 and added them to my Ventoy drive. Although I may not need to resort to those if this solves the issue, I may still test those out just to see if those ISOs have the same issue. I also want to try installing Linux onto another drive for this test, but also because i've been wanting to get back into linux.

I'm currently suspecting the ISOs tho

 

[Adrian the Saxon]

also, i'll add that i've used linux a little bit in the past, i'm willing to give it a try just to help me rule out whether it's a hardware problem or not. Does anybody have any recommendations for a beginner friendly distro that's decent for gaming? Should I give the latest Ubuntu a try?

If you want to try that way ...
No installation. Why would you install a system that can run without this? Ventoy, a USB stick with enough space, a downloaded iso. Run Ventoy, let it do its magic. Boot from the stick and you have a full system running until you reboot.
You people are so fixed to Windows ... which not has this ability.

If you want to try that way ...
I suggest the Manjaro Gnome Edition because then I know exactly which programs to use. but that is completely up to you. Mint, Ubuntu, Arch - (KDE, Gnome, Xfce edition) it is all Linux at the end.

16GB 3600MHz (4 sticks, reduced to 1 stick for install)

The computer should have the complete hardware. No tricks, no contortions.
If you want to try that way ...