Sorry for the long wall of text in advance, I’m honestly at my wit’s end with this issue, as I’ve been investigating it for weeks.

I have a secondary PC that I’ve built out of spare and old parts. It’s been working fine mostly, except for one problem: after booting it up, it would always lead to a BSOD (generic messages, I’ve seen like 10 different types) after about 15 minutes of use, especially if I started gaming.

The most weird thing here is that once the computer reboots, it works fine. I can keep it turned on for hours and get no BSODs, however, if I turn it off, the cycle repeats: one BSOD after boot, then back to normal.

At first I thought it was the RAM. I have 2 16GB Crucial sticks in it. I ran OCCT and memtest, lo’ and behold, both tests would start reporting RAM issues after a couple of minutes. Tried using one at a time, to see which one was borked, but weirdly enough, the problem was still present. Weird that both broke at the same time, but ok.

I put the RAM from my main rig into this secondary one to confirm if the spare sticks are broken. Now, the issue is different. After about 15 minutes from boot, the PC locks up, but doesn’t lead to a BSOD. It just freezes for a couple of seconds and then works fine until I turn it off, then the cycle repeats itself.

At this point I’m super confused, but I noticed that whenever that lockup would happen, I heard the HDD making some weird sounds. I only have a mechanical HDD in the PC that I don’t even use, so I unplug it.

I run my tests again with the main PC RAM, no more lockups. I put the spare RAM back in… no more BSODs. I run OCCT and memtest and everything works fine.

So after all, it seems that the HDD was the root cause of the issue. But now I’m confused about some things:

  • Why was I getting a BSOD with the spare RAM, but only a freeze with the main PC RAM?
  • Why was I getting BSODs from a HDD that was not even in use (the OS is on an SSD)

I don’t really want to plug that HDD in anymore at this point, since everything seems to be working fine and I don’t want to mess something up further