Windows 7 crash shortly after boot

Killerkebab · 27 Feb 2010 at 20:01

I currently use a dual boot, WinXP and Win7 and have done so for a while now. My hard drive is some 500GB Seagate SATA drive. Turned my PC on today, booted into Win7 fine, and about 20 seconds in the PC stopped responding.

I could move the mouse pointer anywhere I want on the screen, but if I clicked on anything there would be no reaction. The only time I've had that problem before is when a hard drive died. So since everything suddenly stopped working I just turned the PC off and back on again - this time the hard drive has completely disappeared and I'm greeted with the usual: BOOT FAILURE INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS OK business because my hard drive is suddenly AWOL...

... except that when I open my PC up, plug the drive into a different SATA port, and restart the PC the drive returns! It boots into Win7 fine and about 20 seconds in... well you get the picture.

If I boot into WinXP however, all is well :confused:

I tried to leave Win7 alone when it "freezes" (like I said, nothing works but the mouse pointer moves so its not like the entire PC has fried) and after a few minutes I get a BSOD with error code: 0x000000F4

Again, booting into WinXP doesn't give me any such problems. I don't know what is causing the issue and I don't know why the hard drive seems to pay the price every time. I'm assuming the fault is software rather than hardware related since I'm on WinXP now and its all good.

The last program I installed on the Win7 partition was VNC server (this was yesterday). However I booted Win7 in safe mode (which works fine, again) and uninstalled it and the problem persists.

Any ideas? I'm all out

Deleted member 77746 · 27 Feb 2010 at 20:05

Do a Windows 7 repair using the disk.

Phoenixdancer · 27 Feb 2010 at 20:15

Yea sounds like a win repair job via cd

Killerkebab · 27 Feb 2010 at 20:26

I'm doing a mem test right now, system restore found no restore points (god damnit). I don't have a system image to restore to either and startup repair found no errors. anything else I can do? bar a format of course

Killerkebab · 27 Feb 2010 at 20:39

I'm in Win7 safe mode atm, is there a way to uninstall programs that require the Windows installer service?

Also, is there a way to make it so Windows Safe mode loads the ATI catalyst driver? The computer won't let me open the catalyst control center.

Killerkebab · 27 Feb 2010 at 21:28

I think I have a culprit!
Once I booted into WinXP I looked at my ATI card in ATI Overdrive - 78degC!

It seems the automatic fan speed isn't any good, at all. In WinXP I can increase fan speed and the temp goes down to 40degC, however I can't do this in Win7 because the PC will crash before I've managed to open the ATI driver. Any way I can manually adjust fanspeed for the graphics card without opening the ATI catalyst center? The ATI CCC won't open in Safe Mode

I think the card overheats in Win7 and not WinXP because of the Aero theme, however I can't disable that before the card overheats either, and I can't disable Aero in Win7 safe mode (unless you guys know a way?)

Another solution would be to fix the card suddenly overheating. I have a ATI 4870HD card, made by XFX. I can remove dust from it but there wasn't really much of it. Any ideas?

Killerkebab · 17 Mar 2010 at 16:24

Right, since the last update I have managed to:
- Solve the heating problem on the ATI card
- Format the Win7 partition and reinstall Win7

This solved my problem for good, I thought. Except that now the crashes are back. I am totally lost for ideas, why would the hard drive disappear after the crash, forcing me to plug it into a different port?

SiriusB · 17 Mar 2010 at 16:33

Could you tell us what Warning or Critical entries you have in Event Viewer around the time of the crash? You will likely have an error relating to the improper shutdown, look for something just before this.

You can access the Event Viewer by running eventvwr

Killerkebab · 17 Mar 2010 at 17:25

You're not going to like this, but none of the entries are new. I get this one in the event viewer every time I start my computer:

14:41:47 Session "Microsoft-Windows-Setup" stopped due to the following error: 0xC000000D

However my problem only appeared today. That is the only warning/critical entry I see before the shutdown time, which the eventlog informs me was:

The previous system shutdown at 14:47:39 on ‎17/‎03/‎2010 was unexpected.

Also, since my HDD "disappears" after we turn the power back on (unless I change SATA port, for some reason) is it safe to assume that whatever issue obviously disables the internal hard drive, meaning that logs won't write? I have an external USB drive, is it possible to get the event logger to write a copy of the logs to that?

Some background info about my computer which might help:
I have a 500GB SATA drive, the first ~150GB is WinXP, then ~350GB Win7
This problem does not affect the WinXP part of the computer at all (I just change the SATA port so that the drive is detected again, and boot to WinXP to post this

)

Killerkebab · 17 Mar 2010 at 17:41

Quick update:

I googled Win7 crash and added my motherboard (Abit AB9), which yielded interesting results. It turns out Abit went bankrupt (I think, anyway) and haven't updated anything in a long, long time - since WinXP is fine I suspected my problem is a driver issue so I've decided to update drivers for my motherboard one by one (i.e: SATA drivers, then chipset drivers, then LAN, etc - since Abit hasn't updated anything). I am posting this on my Win7 partition and so far everything is fine.

I will definitely post again should any problems reappear though, and thank you all for your help