[matthiasvegh]

Hi all, for some reason my old account here was purged, or whatnot.

Anyway, I am literally on the verge of chucking my pc out the window,
so bear with my anxiety.

So it all started when a good old XP of mine BSODd on startup. Prompted me to
chkdsk. So I did so, it recovered some errors, and afterwards I could boot up.
Hooray I thought. Wrongly though. The system was basically castrated, programs wouldn't
show up on the tray, no sound, practically all the services were disabled, with no options
whatsoever to restart them. So I chose to install a new XP.

Or at least I would have, if I could have. I used a different physical disk for this, the install
went through, but upon reboot, to continue installation, it found the first file it read was corrupted.
So I took all my disks to a friend, and managed to install it there. Brought it home, and worked, for a while.

About a month ago, this one died too, and so I chose to nick a hard drive from the next room,
to install Win7. It installed without a glitch, (and might I add, was a very pleasant installation).
It worked, no real problems, but the hard drive was small and slow, so I chose two weeks ago to buy
a new one (WD6400AKS: Western Digital Caviar 640Gb Blue). Partitioned it, and installed Win7.

And it worked, until today, guess what happened, it died. Upon boot, the startup repair tool came up,
and started searching for errors. It found that an operating system file was corrupted.. In the logs
it said the course of action would be to system restore it. So reboot, through the tool again,
took a bit more time now, I assumed it was repairing; Reboot again, and I still couldn't get through to
my OS. Did that about 8-10 Times, then chose to go "advanced" and system restore to today morning.
That went through, but still couldn't boot. I then gave up, choosing another partition, and reinstalling Win7.

Based on that, I would assume this system is going to die on me very soon.
So tell me guys, what am I doing wrong? It can't be a hard drive failure, as it has happened to
3 drives in a row now, one of which I had just bought.

[TerryNet]

I edited out your inappropriate language. Please review the forum rules.

Wanna explain the first sentence about your "old account"?

[matthiasvegh]

I'm Sorry for the inconveniance caused. I am in a very bad state. The last OS died in a matter of 6 days.
About the old account, I'm pretty sure I had an account with the same username, email, and for that matter, password,
as the one I'm posting off.

[TerryNet]

OK, thanks, I'm over the inconvenience now.

I'm no hardware expert but my top suspect by far is the power supply. My guess being that it is a little weak or failing, the hard drive gets too little power at critical times, and damage is inflicted.

If you ever added another device, or replaced one with one that is more power hungry, my suspicion only increases.

Wish I could suggest some way of testing this theory.

[matthiasvegh]

I have suspected many things.
For some reason, it isn't apparent to me, whether or not you know what my rig consists of:

PSU: Chieftec 650W (CFT-650-14CS)
Motherboard: MSI P6N SLI V2
CPU: Intel Q6700 @ 2.66GHz (So no overclock atm)
RAM 2*1GB DDr2 Kingmax 800MHz (Yeah, theyre cheap, but have passed all the memtest I found)
GPU: Gigabyte 9800GT

So now the hard drives:

WD 500GB Blue. 3 Partitions.
WD 640GB BLue 3 Partitions.
Seagate 250Gb 7200.11 One platter, 2 Partitions.
A Maxtor 30Gb, 1 Partition.

So I doubt the PSUs *power* aspect could be the fault.
However, the problems do seem to lie at the reboot process (which I do about weekly)
in which there evidently is a fluctuation in power. But mostly, its a restart, and not a shutdown restart. It's a starting point, but I have no idea how to test it. Nor do I have a multimeter (I know, sad)

I can give you info on the peripherals connected, but from the point of the psu, that should be irrelevant. What does strike me as possibly important, is that if I recall correctly, USB devices retain
power upon shutdown. But I'll have to check to be certain.

EDIT: 30Secs after power down, my USB powered Midi keyboard's Display was still on, so..

Cheers

[TerryNet]

Sorry, I really have nothing more to offer on this.

[matthiasvegh]

Sure, no problem!

[dustyjay]

The best way to test the power supply is with another power supply. A known good one that is. You don't have to install it in the case, just swap the cables with the case laying on it's side with the jumped in power supply sitting on a flat area of the case. I have seen brand new power supplies of fairly good quality cause problems including killing a hard drive.

[cky]

is it possible that his cd drive used to install win7 is not reading the disk properly and installing corrupt files?

[matthiasvegh]

@DustyJay: The problem is of course, that the OS s die after like two weeks; so I can't just swap it out, boot up, and see if it works. Also, whats worrysome is, that HDTune doesn't show any faults on the hard drives..

@CKY: I strongly doubt it. I've used multiple drives. And Like I said, they die after a brief period of working.

[Ambrose]

Hi there

There's something ripping your hard drives apart but what?

I'm affraid you could allmost change the whole system before you're done...

Basicly it could be power, memory etc. but I doubt memory as those usually blue dumps and is ok until doing same thing.


Power is indeed intresting and the one thing I had myself were a faulty mother board, think I blow 3 hard discs before they changed it, and if one don't have warranties then it going to cost...

The hard discs aren't the problem as you allready said.


Good luck...


Ambrose...

[matthiasvegh]

Assuming its the motherboard, what do I say when returning it?
"All my hard drives die while connected to it" ?

Anyhow, I'd need a way to prove one or other components aren't working right.
Both for my sanity's sake, and to show something when I return the component to the place of purchase.

So what I'm doing now, is using Win7's built in system image backup tool.
The question is, does this do what it says on the tin? If the OS dies, can I just reload this,
and forget about it? (Provided I do a backup before each and every restart)

Matt

[Ambrose]

Hi

You should say exactly that to them or call support if any computer brand, best to call them.

They should then tell you what to do, what tests they want you to run or if they accept you to handle it back to them
for exchance or service.


The backup image thing works very nice and you should allways have a backup of your systems when it's fresh so you can go back to this, data you backup as usual on external drive or so.

I tested to go back when I first installed just to test it and it worked fine don't remember think one needed to install again and then run the tool or if one could do it during the install can't recall.


But allways have your data on external device...


Another thing to check is if you know if you change between IDE and AHCI mode, xp were very forgiving for this but W7 aren't,
last week I almost called Hp when I understood I didn't change this back, it would boot 3 seconds or so and then bluedump.


SeYa

Ambrose...