Solved! MSI laptop crashed and no longer boots, help?

Dec 16, 2018
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I was playing fallout 4 VR on my MSI laptop and it got slightly laggy so I decided to save. As I was trying to do this, steam vr froze and was accompanied by a buzzing of the current sounds repeating rapidly. I took off my headset and to my dismay, the ':( sorry your computer has encountered a problem' screen. It loaded and shut down. Now it will not boot to my welcome screen, and after the MSI splash screen, it displays the attached images (all of which are frozen images that flash for a second). Sometimes it looks different, sometimes the cursor and time pop up, and sometimes the pixels turn different colors. All of the time though, it displays a random amount of pixels, and this only lasts for a second or two then it goes black.

I will say, the BIOS boots fine, and displays all my drives like it normally does. I can also boot into Macrium Recovery using my thumb drive I prepared two days ago to upgrade my drive to the 970 evo. No problems there at all.

That being said, I did indeed clone my C drive, and it seemed to work fine. I also upgraded to Thermal Grizzlys Cunductonaut liquid metal. I insulated any of the exposed contacts and resistors with a small amount of silicone rtv. I did both my CPU and the GPU. I noticed massive improvements in temps, and it was about 15 degrees cooler than usual at the time of the crash.

Just in case, I opened it up and checked for leakage, but there wasn't any at all. Everything looked the same as when I put it together earlier. I've even re cloned the old drive and swapped it back (same initial image BEFORE the drive upgrade) nothing... Resetting the pc and wiping the data with the troubleshooting process pre-boot seems to work well until it tries to restart and then I get the same :(crash screen.

I'd much appreciate any help anyone has to offer. I really don't want to lose any data, but it would be better than losing the computer.

Thanks!

Caleb
 
Solution
To anyone looking into this in the future, this was a problem with my gpu's vram not working properly. I bought a new motherboard, because that seemed the most surefire solution to the problem.
You said something about losing data, but you said you reset the PC and wiped the data already, which means everything is already gone.

Assuming system is not in warranty anymore, you can try different RAM. Did the issue start after you swapped the drives and changed the thermal paste to the liquid metal stuff? That is a good clue as to what went wrong.
 
Dec 16, 2018
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I cloned the drives and kept the original smaller one as the backup. I took out the D drive before I wiped it, so currently I still have all my original data. The issue definitely started after all this. It worked beautifully for 2 days like normal before it happened.

Assuming it was my silicone solution to avoiding shorts from the metal (I coated the SMD capacitors around the GPU dye with it) I pulled it off, and accidentally ripped ONE of the little guys off. Haha I dug a hole for myself
 
Dec 16, 2018
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0
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To anyone looking into this in the future, this was a problem with my gpu's vram not working properly. I bought a new motherboard, because that seemed the most surefire solution to the problem.
 
Solution