Okay, my main desktop PC seems to have finally given up the ghost. I was convinced it was a hard drive failure, but it's still failing with a new hard drive, but in a different way. Okay, here's an account of the problems:
For a few days, when booting up, checkdisk would pop up saying it needed to do stuff. I let it run, and it appeared to be deleting a whole bunch of file segments.
After a few days of this, I got fed up with it, and decided to reinstall Windows 7. This was yesterday. It all worked fine, I reinstalled the OS, all my usual programs, drivers, etc. But when starting it up this morning, it failed once again, with checkdisk rearing its ugly head.
I used an old Ubuntu live disk to a) run memcheck (only ran it for an hour and a half, but no errors detected), and b) to notice that it could not access the SSD I was using as my OS drive. So I went out and bought a new SSD and reinstalled Windows on that.
Again, everything seemed to be going well. It even reboted a few times after installing drivers and whatnot, and no problems arose. But now, it's all gone wrong again. It can't detect my Windows installation. So I installed Ubuntu from that old disk to tide me over for a while. It can't bot into that either. Again, it says there's no valid boot device.
So that's it. I'm typing this from my ancient crusty laptop because my main PC just refuses to work any more.
Since replacing the OS drive didn't fix it, and memcheck didn't reveal any glaring errors, I'm guessing it must be the motherboard. Something to do with the BIOS chip being cream crackered? Before I go ahead and pull the trigger on buying more new hardware, does it sound like a motherboard fault? Are there other tests I could run?
Thanks.
-Sly
For a few days, when booting up, checkdisk would pop up saying it needed to do stuff. I let it run, and it appeared to be deleting a whole bunch of file segments.
After a few days of this, I got fed up with it, and decided to reinstall Windows 7. This was yesterday. It all worked fine, I reinstalled the OS, all my usual programs, drivers, etc. But when starting it up this morning, it failed once again, with checkdisk rearing its ugly head.
I used an old Ubuntu live disk to a) run memcheck (only ran it for an hour and a half, but no errors detected), and b) to notice that it could not access the SSD I was using as my OS drive. So I went out and bought a new SSD and reinstalled Windows on that.
Again, everything seemed to be going well. It even reboted a few times after installing drivers and whatnot, and no problems arose. But now, it's all gone wrong again. It can't detect my Windows installation. So I installed Ubuntu from that old disk to tide me over for a while. It can't bot into that either. Again, it says there's no valid boot device.
So that's it. I'm typing this from my ancient crusty laptop because my main PC just refuses to work any more.
Since replacing the OS drive didn't fix it, and memcheck didn't reveal any glaring errors, I'm guessing it must be the motherboard. Something to do with the BIOS chip being cream crackered? Before I go ahead and pull the trigger on buying more new hardware, does it sound like a motherboard fault? Are there other tests I could run?
Thanks.
-Sly