[bpontin]

Alright so about a week ago, out of nowhere, the computer decided to start attempting to boot from the secondary drive rather than the primary drive so it was saying “please insert boot disk etc…” and wouldn’t boot into windows. This started happening completely out of the blue, I didn’t change any configurations, no new drivers, hardware, software nothing. So I remedied the problem by hitting F8 when my computer turned on to access the boot device priority menu and selecting to boot from the secondary harddrive which was, in this case, the drive which contained Vista.

All was well for about a day or so until I came home to a blue screen of death. Immediately I thought it must have something to do with the boot priority problems I was having so I turned off the computer and checked out the harddrive configuration. Sure enough, the secondary drive was plugged into SATA slot 1 and the primary drive was plugged into SATA slot 2. So I reversed the order of the harddrives so that my Vista-containing drive was plugged into slot 1. I started up the computer and it booted just fine without having to change the boot order in the boot priority screen. At this point I assumed that I had solved my problem and that the blue screen was related to the fact that the harddrive was plugged into the wrong slot. But of course this wasn’t the case. The next day I got another blue screen, and another, and another!

The blue screens are totally intermittent and seem to happen ONLY when I am NOT infront of the computer and when the computer is presumably at idle. I have checked the crash dumps but they don’t point to anything specifically like a particular driver, piece of hardware or process. I restored the computer to a previous restore point before the problems started to happen but this didn’t fix the problem, the blue screens are still happening.

So I have a couple of questions: First off, what would cause a computer that has the OS drive plugged into the secondary SATA slot that has been booting completely normally for months change so that it began to try to boot from the drive plugged into the primary SATA slot? And second, does anyone have any idea what may be causing these blue screens? I can only assume that the two issues are connected, it is just way too much of a coincidence for them to not be related.

I can post the contents of the crash dumps if needed (I am not at the computer right now so I don’t have access to them). The computer is running Vista Home Premium.

[bpontin]

I have some pictures of the blue screens. As you can see they are inconsistent and never seem to report the same error. I can supply minidumps tomorrow when i get access to them!

http://img17.imageshack.us/i/img1716v.jpg/
http://img195.imageshack.us/i/img1718p.jpg/
http://img229.imageshack.us/i/img1721j.jpg/
http://img195.imageshack.us/i/img1723k.jpg/

[Rollin' Rog]

The description of the boot problem has my head spinning, can I assume it is "resolved" ( the only explanation I can think of is that you may have used a different boot order at one time and not changed it -- F12, pressed on startup on many machines can also offer selections here)?

For the BSODs, they are all different and not a driver file mentioned, which suggests a hardware issue, perhaps faulty ram if you have not tested.

If your system drive is not 'c', then you will have to look for the minidumps on the system drive.

I can run a debugging utility on the dump files if you do this:

1 > create a new folder on the desktop and call it "dumpcheck" or whatever you like
2 > navigate to c:\windows\minidump and copy the last few minidump files to that folder. *this assumes 'c' is your boot drive, if it is not, subsitute accordingly
3 > close the folder and right click on it and select Send to Compressed (zipped) Folder.
4 > use the "manage attachments" in the "advanced" reply window to upload that zip file here as an attachment.

This might point us to a non Microsoft driver causing the error, if one exists for it.

If you do not see any minidumps, be sure you are not using any cache cleaner such as CCleaner. Also run sysdm.cpl and select Advanced > Startup and Recovery. Make sure "small memory dump" is the one chosen under "write debugging information" and the location should be %systemroot%\minidump

Since almost all bugchecks can be caused by faulty ram, I would recommend you perform memory tests.

In Vista you can perform a memory check by running [b]mdsched.exe[/b[ and on reboot to the scanner press F1 for the Advanced options and run the extended test.