Ffs... Windows 7 corrupted itself already

[brammers]

Been running win 7 for a couple of days, noticed it was a tinsy bit unstable... Outlook 2007 crashed quite often, Lightroom occasionally.

Ran a big pano in a couple of programs and tried to open it in photoshop - photoshop crashes. Restart the PC for a clean boot and it won't restart windows. I'm left with a screen telling me that windows was unable to start. Startup repair can't fix anything, neither of the 2 system restore points I've got saved works. I don't have an image and none of the tests I've run have come up with anything.

Totally at a loss - is anyone else who's clean-installed Win 7 wishing for the trouble-free times of Vista 64bit?

I know I'm giving you nothing to work with guys, but any ideas other than reformat? It simply won't boot...

[brammers]

Well I'm going to bed, was supposed to be getting an early night. I'll leave you nightowls with as much info as I can, and hopefully someone will have something amazing in the morning.

64bit, Athlon Phenom II 2.6gz quadcore - never overclocked.
8gig ram - all tested fine, all ran fine on Vista 64bit.
Dedicated gfx - very cheap Nvidia card, think it's a 9400.
Win 7 64bit installed on the C drive along with my programs. Docs installed on the D drive.
I've unplugged everything but the essentials since the crash - no good.

Before it refused to shut down it installed some 'critical' updates. I have 2 system restore points in the list, neither works. Putting the DVD in doesn't work either - just takes you back to the same system restore screen. No images to restore from...

I dunno guys - I honestly can't believe that it looks like a reformat is on the cards about 3 days after i set it up. So much work on, I really don't need to be spending another day setting it up again... really not happy Any suggestions much appreciated.

[Splash]

Well... my first thoughts are RAM or hard drive. You say that the memory is tested fine, so I guess you're looking at chkdsk. I assume the RAM has been tested since the problems began with a nice long run of Memtest?

Other than that I think you need to know which tests you have run so we have an idea as to where we go with troubleshooting this.

[kalniel]

Ran a big pano in a couple of programs and tried to open it in photoshop - photoshop crashes. Restart the PC for a clean boot and it won't restart windows. I'm left with a screen telling me that windows was unable to start.

Before it refused to shut down it installed some 'critical' updates.

Can you clarify how the problem occured exactly? This refusal to shut down thing seems to be in addition to the problem saying windows is unable to start.

The fact that it's picking the right partition to boot off is a good start, so probably no MBR problems. What do you mean by startup repair doesn't fix anything? Is it failing, or does it think that everything is okay?

I would boot up to the recovery console and run a system file check which will replace any system protected files that have been corrupted - I think if you run it from the recovery console it'll always use the original install files rather than the dllcache on the hard disk, but I guess you could delete(well, rename) the hard disk cache if you were worried about that (\System32\Dllcache). This will hopefully undo the effects of whatever happened in your windows update if that was the cause of the problem.

The most similar situation I've had to this was when I updated a windows XP computer and almost exactly the same thing happened - in the event it was caused by a printer driver that was incompatible with IE7 (obviously ) and it had even messed up safemode etc. That took some sorting out, but I would not put it past some kind of driver you had for printer/camera/card reader causing some kind of wobble, especially if it was USB and/or storage capable.

[brammers]

Hi Kalniel.

By 'shut down' I meant 'boot up' - it shut down just fine. My bad.

Startup repair acknowledges a problem but fails to fix it.

I had a look at the recovery console, but decided just to reformat. I'm not an advanced command prompt user, couldn't find the DLLcache dir and couldn't find any tools either... Luckily it was only 3 days before it crashed - although all my programs were installed there wasn't very much data on the C drive.

Spent all last night working on a photo - left the working copy on the desktop... Guess what I'll be doing tonight?

[kalniel]

It might be worth getting hold of a bootCD or linux live distribution CD so that you can move files before reformating the windows partition in the future - very handy for just shoving desktop files to the D: for example.

The command to do a system file check at a command prompt is simply

sfc /scannow

and I'm sure we can help take you through anything else.. but maybe next time if you've already reformatted!

Still, at least you had the sense that you've only lost the work in progress copy