Windows 7 install/boot problem.

Pete.Dakota · 25 Jan 2011 at 20:24

A few days ago I got a blue screen, and since was unable to reboot W7. I've got a 320GB Western Digital Caviar Blue, it's about one year old and has 80 days (1920 hours) of powered on time and has been through 800+ power cycles.

Using ultimate boot disk's utilities I'm able to wipe the drive and then edit/format/create/delete its partitions. When I wiped the drive, formatted it into NTFS and re-installed windows from disk, Windows booted. But after about 1 hour I got another blue screen and wasn't able to load Windows again.

To replicate I did the exact same thing, but this time as soon as Windows had loaded and I was on the desktop, I restarted, before it was able to blue screen. It didn't load Windows again. And again needed wiping.

I've run a memtest and my memory is fine. I've also tried using different, older RAM sticks. The blue screen stop messages seem to indicate a driver issue.

The fact that my W7 disk is able to install the whole OS and then happiliy load Windows once without a restart, but then not reboot, seems to me that there's a problem with the MBR, or some weird partitioning problem that corrupts the boot files upon restart.

Is there anyway to diagnose and repair this problem? Or is the HDD borked? Given that I got a random BSOD when everything had been fine for months, and since it's been uncooperative, I'm tempted to just buy a new HDD. But I'd like to try as much as possible first.

Thanks for any feedback.

Epoch · 26 Jan 2011 at 18:46

What is the stop code you get on the blue screen?

Pete.Dakota · 26 Jan 2011 at 20:57

I've had loads of different ones:

IRQ NOT LESS OR EQUAL
Attempt made to write to read-only memory
BAD POOL HEADER

Ubuntu has told me that the drive does have errors. But I couldn't work out if these were physical errors, or data.

Epoch · 27 Jan 2011 at 09:30

Remove any unnecessary hardware (printers, scanners etc), and try booting with 1 stick of ram.
Also are you overclocking your CPU or Graphics card?
Finally maybe resetting your BIOS to default settings could help.

matthab · 27 Jan 2011 at 10:22

Download WD tools and run mem test.

I have drives that have done well over 13,000hrs of usage and still good.

dave1983 · 27 Jan 2011 at 11:13

Pete.Dakota said:
I've had loads of different ones:

IRQ NOT LESS OR EQUAL
Attempt made to write to read-only memory
BAD POOL HEADER

Ubuntu has told me that the drive does have errors. But I couldn't work out if these were physical errors, or data.

ahh the lovely BSOD error, i have had many of these errors on my HD WD Blue, my hard drive started create error when it was packing up, it would randomly Blue screen on me, then the next day be perfectly fine. my previous error was when it froze at pool data, which needed a full OS install.

IRQ_LESS_THAN_EQUAL is mainly caused by spywares which corrupt apart of the registry, your best option is to start in safe mode and download antivirus software.

If however, you system is having problems installing your OS, then it sounds like your HDD is dieing a painful death and when you try to repair the error, it would say something like "Corruptbootvolume" chkdsk".