Reoccuring computer problem.

[Chan]

Hi, I built this system (in sig) about a month ago. It worked absolutely fine for about 2 weeks, all well and dandy. Then for absolutely no reason, I went to turn it on one day and windows wouldn't boot. One fresh install later, another week passed with no problems... then one time i had just exited out of a full screen game, went to load I.E and bham, complete lock up. Did a manual restart, windows failed to load and after that would simply blue screen after selecting either of the start options (Last known settings or normal). At that point i said, ok wtf, and took it to a friend who has some diag progs and we found that the registry Hive was missing. The interesting thing to note about these two times, is that both times i did not have the option to repair windows, the comp just totally didnt recognise windows was installed EVEN THOUGH, after using a admin program to access my harddrive remotely, all the windows installation files were still on the harddrive, and intact.

So, another reformat later, system lasts afew days before today, while alt-tabbing out of a game the comp locks up - I manually restarted it, This time after selecting the "Run normally" option windows took like 5 mins to load, but eventually did, but once it had it displayed the message "You may be a victim of software contrifiting, click here to resolve" well clicking that locked up the system and after that it just wouldnt boot - So after another long sigh i've just finished doing another reformat.

Everything IS working atm.. but then again it did the last times untill this random thing is happening which seems to be completely screwing up windows.

Has anyone ever had a similar problem? Or any advice as to what could be causing the problem. Hopefully my friend will be able to run some hardware diag stuff tomorrow, to try and resolve if its a memory or harddrive issue. I have absolutely no experience with anything like this, ever, but since its a new system I'm taking a stab in the dark its either something windows is doing wrong with causes memory to be lost, or its possibly a driver issue (but again i know very little about that). If you want more information, like programs installed, driver versions, etc etc just post or send me a PM. I'd very much like to remedy this problem as doing a reformat every week is NOT even remotely funny.

Thanks, James.

[Nick F]

I think it could be one of two things. Your Cpu could be over heating and that's why your machine keeps freezing or your hard drive could be damaged...

[Clunk]

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000597.html

might explain it, if you arent patched, then something might have got into your system and killed it?

[da_ging]

could be you've got memory problems that are corrupting windows files every so often but hard to say with out knowing the error codes that the blue screens give you

download memtest to check the memory for errors http://www.memtest.org/#downiso

[Chan]

Hi, just got on this morning.

Its not my CPU overheating, it barely ever reaches 30oc on load (Abit Guru software monitoring it), same for the case temp barely reaches 32-35oc even in this recent hot as hell weather.

I am fully patched up, and I think the reason i got the "You may be a victim of software counterfeiting" error after the crash was cause something on my system had been wiped.

I'll download and do the Memtest right now, and post any results. Are there any tests that test harddrive stability? As I'd like to test my harddrive too, one thing worth noting is when I reinstall my mobos drivers, it always installs the Nvidia IDE drivers for the sata drive, which then makes the system treat my harddrive as a removable peice of hardware (with the system trey icon etc), I think i read somewhere these drivers are kinda dodgy but I dunno if i dreamed that or not lol.

*update*

Just finished letting Memtest86+ run for 1 hour, during that time 3 full cycles passed and no errors shown.

[chriscom]

What power supply do you have?

Could be struggling at times and thus not powering all your hardware.

But before checking that the first thing I'd do would be to test your hard drive.

Try something like this.
http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/Ma...&downloadID=22

[Chan]

PSU is in sig, Hiper Type-R 580W. Ran it in my old system before i built this one, and has always had rock solid lines as far as i can tell.

Will that software work on my comp? I'm using a Western Digital but its running on a Nvidia NF4 based system and i noticed "Note: PowerMax v 4.21 will not detect ATA or SATA hard disks connected to embedded or add in RAID controllers, NVIDIA Force 4".

Oh, scratch that first thought, i just read further and it requirs you to make a bootable floopy disk, I've actually not bothered to install a floopy on this comp as I "never" use one so decided not to. Guess I'll need a different prog.