fx8350, asus sabertooth 990fx r2.0, asus r9 280, h100i, 8gb geil evo veloce 1600mhz, corsair cs650m, reusing the 500gb wd blue hdd from my old build, all in a r4.
Here's the thing; it started up without a hitch, installed a few drivers, after one of the restarts it froze up after 5 mins, had to reset, booted again normal, same thing. Works fine in safe or recovery mode though. Kept doing that even after switching ram around, trying some adata 8gb pc3-12800 1600mhz ram, my old evga 650Ti, and an asrock 990fx extreme9, nothing worked. Should I try a new psu? Wiping the hard drive? Something else? I've been desktopless for a couple weeks now.
sounds like something is getting hot. try swapping out video cards. you can run memtest on the ram. boot with a livecd of some sort of linux like systemrescuecd or something and run it for a while. maybe even xubuntu live... look for hot temps.
No. You'll have to backup your files then format the drive and reinstall the OS. It sounds very much like you're having driver conflicts between the chipset drivers for the old and new motherboards. This is why it's recommended to do clean OS installs between builds.
Yup, I had windows 7 on it so I decided to do a custom install of windows 8. It put all my old files in windows.old (not that i'll be keeping much). Everything works fine now, thanks for the help.