Associate
- Joined
- 31 Aug 2009
- Posts
- 1,015
- Location
- Surrey, UK
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.
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.
Last edited: