Windows refuses to boot. Cannot boot from USB. Rare fresh install screen but no USB input. PNP Driver Watchdog error BSOD

But none of my mice or keyboards work. They'll work briefly for a few seconds and then stop. Nothing works to get them going again forcing me to shut down yet again.

This sounds like there's a hardware problem with either the motherboard or CPU, or possibly the power supply. What motherboard model do you have? Is it one of the Asus models with a backup UEFI/BIOS storage? Does it have one of those 2-digit error code displays?

Is the failure with USB peripherals true for both the fixed USB ports on the back and front USB ports connected via one of the headers? Is it true for both USB 2 and 3 ports?

It's possible that a bad component is shorting a signal on your board.

To troubleshoot:

1. Strip everything from the motherboard except for the CPU and the PSU connection. Yes even the RAM. Disconnect all external cables.
2. Connect your monitor to one of the motherboard video outputs (not the GPU, that should be removed).
3. Connect a keyboard to a USB 2 port on the back of the motherboard.
4. Power on the motherboard. Does it POST? Can you interact with the UEFI interface?
5. If not, don't panic yet - some boards will POST without RAM and some won't. If yours did not, then insert one RAM stick in the first slot and try powering it on again. We want to define what the bare-minimum startup configuration is.
6. Is it behaving any differently? Does the keyboard continue to work, or does it stop working after awhile like before?
7. If everything seems OK at this point, reinstall your OS hard drive and test again.
8. Continue re-adding components one at a time and testing between each until failure happens.

The goal is to isolate the source of potential problems. You have to do it systematically. Rushing will make the troubleshooting worthless. Take notes.

When you have a moment, a list of the system hardware would be helpful. Also if you have the paper manual for the motherboard get it out.

If you have two sticks of RAM in there, take one out and try running with only one, then the other. Make sure you have the single stick in the correct slot for running on a single stick.

This also looks like a failing SSD/HDD. Corrupted boot sector or maybe total disk failure.

Worst case is the mobo is failing.

Cmon, why would you reply to “I can’t use my keyboard in bios” with “install Linux”?

Well that's your answer, you usually won't get a normal Windows boot up with bad RAM. And if by some miracle Windows manages to make it to the desktop with bad RAM it's just going to crash out sooner or later.

You're not going to be able to do any Windows re-installs with bad RAM either.

The good news is that's very unlikely all your RAM is bad. You have 4 sticks - this will take a bit of time but what you can do is take out all RAM sticks. Then install one stick, do a memtest run, if it looks okay take the stick out and repeat with each of the other 3 RAM sticks. That should give you an idea on which RAM stick(s) are bad, the bad ones just keep them aside and don't re-install them.

After testing each RAM stick individually you can re-install all the good RAM sticks, do a final memtest run & verify it all works together (it should be fine at this point but sometimes you have to do multiple memtest runs to suss out bad RAM).

Once you remove all bad RAM your system should be able to boot into a Windows USB install and make it through the entire install normally. Or alternatively you can test if your current Windows 10 can fix itself once the RAM issue is resolved but there's a good chance it's pretty broken now.

I was all excited to help at first cuz I had a VERY SIMILAR ISSUE recently and it was the CMOS battery. I’ve never even had to THINK about a CMOS battery in all my years of computer work, and a machine of mine went from working normally to freezing on POST. No BIOS, no boot select, just froze. Tested the voltage of the battery, 1.4v! I put in a 15+ year old battery I had in another old machine and it booted up perfectly.

I’m sorry that’s not your issue. D: Best luck!

Unplanned crash like all this tells me RAM. I would say disk, but if you can't get to even a boot disk (which loads to ram) then I say ram. Watchdog too to me says ram because it sounds like it tried to write and failed. Run memtest and see what happens

Memtest results for the disregarded.

We have been giving them this simple advice about memtest86 for 10 days now (they have several posts regarding this issue, you can look it up), they just disregard it.

(That and live-booting any OS from USB just for diagnostics, to see if the issues are there, maybe stress test it.)

It seems like an issue a bit complex to diagnose, but with some structure you can always rule out things until you get to the core issue, and then try to fix that or replace it.

See, it wasn't that hard to run the test (it didn't even take hours to find the errors). This could have saved you 10 days.

But good news, it's DDR4, you can actually kinda buy that.
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(Or maybe even test individual sticks, maybe they aren't all faulty, and just run with what works.)

Absolutely worthless advice. Feel bad. This it's likely hardware.

We can only lead a user to the water hole. We can’t make them drink.