Random FIle corruption - please help!

Marakith

Marakith

Marakith

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Joined
22 Nov 2004
Posts
407
Location
London
Hello,

I built a lovely NF7-S Barton rig about three years ago. It served we well and without problems. It used a pair of SATA drives. I had never run SP2 on this machine before.

About a month ago, I gave it to my mum. I bought a new copy of Windows with SP2 included on the disk from Overclockers. Formatted the main drive and installed it onto the PC.

About a week after delivering it, my mum called me to say that the PC wouldn't start up. When I went to visit my mum, it turned out that the BSOD was reporting "Unmountable Boot Volume".

So I fixed the boot via the recovery console and presumed it was a case of a dying disk. I bought a new drive and prepared to install it again over Christmas, when I'd be visiting.

So I installed the new drive on 23rd December, did a fresh install of Windows from the SP2 disk.

On 29th December, the PC died again. This time it wouldn't even get to a BSOD. The recovery console wouldn't work and I had to slave the disk to another PC to repair it. Then it would boot again.

So I reinstalled Windows, but this time off another copy of Windows which only had SP1 on it. This was because I had heard stories of problems similar to mine caused by SP2 installs. I then updated everything up to SP2, installed Office, Firefox and Norton 2006.

I've just Remote Assisted onto my mum's PC and found errors when I run CHKDSK. I haven't done a /F on them yet because I don't want to stop the PC booting altogether and I live a fair distance away.

I have also run the Event Viewer and found 2 errors. One is an NTFS error complaining about the the file structure on D:. The other is an error referring to comething called SidebySide.

My theories are so far:

1] It can't be the HDD, since I have replaced that.
2] It might be power supply, but it looks pretty stable in the BIOS hardware monitor.
3] It could be that the SP2 install came with special data destruction code.
4] It could be that the SATA drivers bundled with the SP2 install were iffy.
5] The SATA cables could be loose (I used to plug and unplug them a lot when I owned the PC).
6] Although it is a fresh install, it could be a virus that has hitched along on my mum's Documents and old desktop files that I copied across.

Has anyone had a similar experience or have any clues as to what might be going on? I'm at my wit's end!

Thanks in advance!
 
Emo_hug said:
Possible a RAM problem try memcheck, also try running an anti-virues scan on the disk either using a live cd or attaching it to another machine as a slave.
Click to expand...

Don't attach your previous HDD until you've done a memtest, you don't want to corrupt your only backup.

Burnsy
 
Emo_hug said:
i didn't quite understand the "you don't want to corrupt your only backup" ? i'm not sure how its going to corropt windows or files?
Click to expand...

I may have read your post wrong, but you don't want to attach your old HDD and do a virus scan if your RAM is didgy, as the file access may corrupt the backup.

Burnsy
 
Hi there!

Thanks for all the answers to this post.

I have used the "Ultimate Boot CD" and run MemTest for 12 hours.

20 tests have run and 20 tests have passed.

Is there anything else I should consider testing?

Thanks!
 
Haven't done a BIOS update in about 2 years.

I also hadn't run SP2 on that PC before either, so possibly the old BIOS is clashing with SP2 somehow?

My beef is that it is very hard to replicate the problem - it just happens when I'm not there, which makes it tricky to diagnose. :confused:
 
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