[tgrover54]

I have been running Windows 7 Home Premium for about four months. Generally, I am very happy with it. Big improvement over XP and Vista. But every few weeks, my OS freezes, and the only option I have to do anything is to shut down holding the power button (hate to do this). Then it will not restart the OS at all. I have made a repair disc, after losing 2 weeks of work last time (I now backup online every day). I go to the boot screen and it shows gobbledy gook mixed up letters, but I navigate to what looks like "boot from CD". The repair disc brings up the repair and I have to have it restore to start Windows normally. But why does this keep happening, and how can I make adjustments to make it stop?

[Nick Tompson]

It may be worth to actually test your hard drive (what brand is it, I may be able to link you to some diagnostic software).

Also, testing your RAM with memtest86+ would be a good idea.

[tgrover54]

Hi, Nick,
Thanks for the quick reply. My hard drive is an ATA drive. It says all driver software is up to date.

[Nick Tompson]

I was more interested in the "brand" of the hard drive, for example Samsung or Western Digital, so I could provide the correct diagnostic utilities.

[tgrover54]

Excuse my ignorance, Nick. Where would I find that? I looked in Device Manager.

[Nick Tompson]

If you give me the exact text that displays for your hard drive in device manager, I should be able to work it out for you

[tgrover54]

Sure. It says the same thing when I look in the properties box in the C drive. ST3320620AS ATA Drive. Driver provider is Microsoft, version 6.1.7600.16385

[Nick Tompson]

Thanks
Its a Seagate drive.

Before we start, do you have a blank CD handy?

[tgrover54]

Sure do--sorry for the delay.

[dustyjay]

If you are showing a corrupt screen before it gets to the menu to boot from CD, it does not sound like a hard drive problem to me. Disconnect the hard drive from the motherboard then start your system, do you still get the corrupt screen at start up?

[Rich-M]

First thing I would do is run memtest86 for what you are describing. www.memtest.org will give you an iso download you convert to a bootable cd. Run 4 complete tests, each test has 8 cycles and if you see as much as one error, ram is corrupt or mismatched.

[tgrover54]

The same thing happened today, so I do want to fix this. Diagnostics on the Seagate hard drive show it passes all tests. On the Memtest website, there are several downloads. Which one would be appropriate to download and run?

[Rich-M]

Originally Posted by tgrover54

The same thing happened today, so I do want to fix this. Diagnostics on the Seagate hard drive show it passes all tests. On the Memtest website, there are several downloads. Which one would be appropriate to download and run?

Newest:
** Memtest86+ V4.10 (04/05/2010) **
then it depends what you want to use i.e. floppy disk, usb flash disk or cd. If bootable cd use the zip iso, open it to get the iso file and then burn iso to bootable cd.
Before you ask this will do that:
http://www.snapfiles.com/get/burncdcc.html

[tgrover54]

I am obviously doing something wrong. Neither of these programs will burn to my CD-R. It keeps ejecting the disc, even though it is a new, blank disc and I even formatted it to be sure it was clean. This is extremely frustrating.

[Nick Tompson]

You shouldn't format it - you don't need to.
Just use a blank CD-R.

Try ImgBurn instead.