Solved Son Built His Own Gaming Computer But It's Not Working

My son took his own hard-earned money and bought components to build a gaming computer while he was home from college this summer, but it's not working and he is beyond frustrated. He has zero background in Windows or in computers in general (used a Mac all through high school/college), so I give him credit for trying. I'd like to help him, but it's beyond me at the moment too.

His components are as follows:
MSI PRO Z790-P WiFi DDR4 Motherboard
3.6GHz Intel 12th gen Core I7-12700k Processor
(2) G.Skill Ripjaws V 16GB DDR4-32000 RAM
AMD Radeon RX6600 2X 8G RFB Video Card
Crucial 2TB B P310 Gen4 NVMe SSD
WD Mainstream Blue 4TB HDD
Thermaltake Smart 600W 80+ ATX PS
A case, various fancy lights and fans

He built his pc and we used Windows MCT to create a USB to install Windows 11 Education, whatever version was current in July. (He had to wait until the fall semester began to activate the installation, which as far as I know he took care of.) The computer was working for its intended purpose over the summer, but he ran into problems when he went back to school and I don't believe it worked the entire semester.

He's back home with it now, and as I said very frustrated over his inability to figure out why it won't load up games on the Xbox app. I know he has spent countless hours watching videos and checking all his connections on the motherboard, not sure what else he has tried. I'm trying to help him and so far this is what I know:

1) The OS is painfully slow, takes five minutes or more to boot up. Called MS support and got a tech who connected and took control and checked out various stuff over the course of an hour then went into system recovery and started PC reset with keeping all personal files. He wished us well and sent an email with the support number. We waited it out and 1.5 hours later the reset "failed in the SAFE_OS phase with an error during MIGRATE_DATA operation" (error code 0x8007042B - 0x2000D)

2) Ran Belarc Advisor and the report it spits out doesn't give me any clues, all the components listed above show as active (the report is apparently too large to upload here) ... but it does indicate the OS is installed on the HDD not the SSD. That's not ideal for gaming, so planned to fix that while doing a clean install following the excellent tutorial available on this site. Used MCT to create a new USB and tried to install from that after unplugging the HDD. That goes absolutely nowhere, nothing boots, screen is black, system is hung. As I type this, I realize we didn't try installing from the USB with the HDD plugged in. Not sure if that makes a difference.

3) The personal files are completely unnecessary since he only wants to use it for Xbox, so we tried to reset completely clean from system recovery. That appears to finish, but nothing is changed and we've tried that several times. The Belarc report says the OS is version 25H2 build 26200.7462 which seems to be up to the minute.

4) Tried using DEL key to get into UEFI during reboot, but nothing happens, screen is black, system is hung. Realized I've never seen an MSI logo pop us as the system boots, just a bunch of black until the Windows spinning dots show up. Tried using advanced startup from system recovery, and that is slightly better, seems like something wants to happen with slight flashes across screen, but still nothing happening... moving and clicking mouse does nothing, but system finally booted into Windows after we pressed enter key.

If you've read this far, I thank you sincerely. My son wants to take the whole thing back to Micro Center where he bought the components and let them figure it out, but I hate to admit defeat. Does anyone have any suggestions on what to try next?

It's best to remove the HDD and then complete the reinstall to make sure the SSD is used, that should take care of the speed issue. The Xbox app issues are unlikely due to hardware. He probably needs to be signed into a MS account to use it, other than that if there are any error messages for the Xbox app y suggest posting those here. There also should be an event log for Xbox which will likely have clues to his issue

Pull the power plug for 10 minutes, disconnect the HDD then reconnect the power WITH your prepared USB plugged in, hit the key to invoke the UEFI (BIOS) and select he boot override option to select your USB, when the install start use the option to delete all partitions then continue.

@sspohl Turn off computer. Insert prepared USB. Turn on computer and immediately
start pressing F11. This will invoke a one-time boot menu. Select the USB,
press enter and install windows. The one-time boot menu will look similar
to this.

Scott said:

@sspohl Turn off computer. Insert prepared USB. Turn on computer and immediately
start pressing F11. This will invoke a one-time boot menu. Select the USB,
press enter and install windows. The one-time boot menu will look similar
to this.

Click to expand...

Didn't i just say that?

Rollback_Jockey said:

Didn't i just say that?

Click to expand...

No, you said

Rollback_Jockey said:

hit the key to invoke the UEFI (BIOS) and select he boot override option to select your USB

Click to expand...

The one-time boot menu bypasses the need to go into the UEFI (BIOS).

Thank you for those helpful responses! Turns out the first issue we had was with the graphics card, for some reason it wasn't allowing the MSI motherboard startup screens to show when we were entering UEFI. Once we took that out we could see the UEFI screen and could change the boot priority. It made me realize the RFB in the video card spec must stand for refurbished -- I think he got a piece of junk and will have to look into a new card...

We continued on with the clean install which went mostly according to plan, except it says it has no networking capability... I'm guessing that is a driver issue so I'm off to another forum to figure out how to proceed

sspohl said:

Thank you for those helpful responses! Turns out the first issue we had was with the graphics card, for some reason it wasn't allowing the MSI motherboard startup screens to show when we were entering UEFI. Once we took that out we could see the UEFI screen and could change the boot priority. It made me realize the RFB in the video card spec must stand for refurbished -- I think he got a piece of junk and will have to look into a new card...

We continued on with the clean install which went mostly according to plan, except it says it has no networking capability... I'm guessing that is a driver issue so I'm off to another forum to figure out how to proceed

Click to expand...

Hmmm - have you tried connecting via ethernet as basic drivers for that are pretty standard.

Also, there are many very cheap external usb wifi dongles (<£10 last time I looked) that are pretty much plug and play. I have used them on old devices where getting drivers was difficult for internal wifi cards.

If nothing else it usually gets pc connected so you more easily install vendor specific drivers.

I had the ethernet cable plugged in, but it said it had no drivers whatsoever... the whole thing has been strange! I did get drivers off MSI site and once we updated the LAN driver it connected and started pulling in all kinds of drivers through MSI connect. We still have some cleanup to do, the SSD has one gigantic partition labeled recovery and the HDD needs a complete format because I think for sure something on that is corrupted, and we have to figure out if the graphics card is usable or not.... but right now his diy pc is running the xbox app faster than ever and I left him happily playing some game

Here is som basic to do if you are starting from scratch :

Go to MSI website and get latest BIOS for your board ver. I OR II ! (it is labeled on board, maybe at the bottum)
When you are there, get latest drivers for the board and save on a free USB-drive.

Unzip the BIOS-file and place in the root of USB-drive or root of C - I think my MSI Z690 was able to see that too.
You need to extract it from zip !

Shut down ..

Make sure the Crusial M.2 NVMe is mouted in the slot nearest CPU

Pull all drives but the M.2 from motherboard incl. the Radeon GPU and mount the USB with BIOS file and start
PC in BIOS (DEL repeatly when power on)

Flash your BIOS frem menu in BIOS and load system default. Then ajust to you needs, but make sure it it set to
UEFI boot ... and maybe disable the funktion for the board to automatic download drivers, ajust boot order etc.

Shut down

You then boot up on your mounted USB with Windows 11 (i think F9 og F12 repeatly when power on PC
will give You the choice to boot from USB)

When you are asked where to install you delete ALL partitions on the M.2. !! The USB-drive is listed also, so be aware
to only delete all partitions on M.2

When it says no allocated space on disk you proceed without creating a partition, installer will make partitions
the right way for You.

If you want to awoid a Microsoft account, there are lots of guides for it here and I would then install with no internet.

When up and running install the ME firmware and other drivers for the setup. ME is found same place as BIOS an
the installer runs from within Windows.

Last I would shut down and install the Radeon and WD Blue - reboot and install latest drivers for Radeon offline.

Thank you for those detailed instructions. I think we're going to practice on reinstalling the OS a couple times before he goes back to school so it won't be such a mystery next time something gets fouled up.

sspohl said:

I had the ethernet cable plugged in, but it said it had no drivers whatsoever... the whole thing has been strange! I did get drivers off MSI site and once we updated the LAN driver it connected and started pulling in all kinds of drivers through MSI connect. We still have some cleanup to do, the SSD has one gigantic partition labeled recovery and the HDD needs a complete format because I think for sure something on that is corrupted, and we have to figure out if the graphics card is usable or not.... but right now his diy pc is running the xbox app faster than ever and I left him happily playing some game

Click to expand...

Excellent, sspohl! Congratulations!

Kind regards,

tecknot

sspohl said:

I had the ethernet cable plugged in, but it said it had no drivers whatsoever... the whole thing has been strange! I did get drivers off MSI site and once we updated the LAN driver it connected and started pulling in all kinds of drivers through MSI connect. We still have some cleanup to do, the SSD has one gigantic partition labeled recovery and the HDD needs a complete format because I think for sure something on that is corrupted, and we have to figure out if the graphics card is usable or not.... but right now his diy pc is running the xbox app faster than ever and I left him happily playing some game

Click to expand...

Just for your information; that partition called "Recovery" should be only arround 876Mb large. When installing Windows; delete every partition on the C-drive. Then let Windows make a new partition. (on a completely empty drive, not assigned to anything) It will generate 3 partitions;
- Partition 1; Size: 200Mb (EFI system partition)
- Partition 2; Size: 876Mb (Recovery partition)
- Partition 3; Size: Remainder of the space left on the drive. (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Basic Data Partition) *The C-drive*

Thank you, that's helpful. I really need to go back and look at disk management to see how it got carved up -- will do that when we get the HDD back up and reformatted.