Any Last Ideas Before I Wipe Disk and Install Fresh?

[Glenwing]

So, my Windows 7 installation just broke down over the last 24 hours.  I have all my data backed up on two other machines (sadly no full system image backups though) so if I have to just reinstall, that's alright.  But I figured I'd see if anyone had any last ideas I haven't tried.

 

First sign of trouble was Skype, it started crashing randomly, giving a "Disk I/O Error" message.  So I opened up Samsung Magician which can access my drive's S.M.A.R.T. status monitoring data (I'm running a 256GB 840 Pro) and it said everything was fine.  Then I ran CrystalDiskInfo just to make sure, and it said everything was fine too.

 

Then I tried to schedule Chkdsk /r, and now the plot thickens.  Instead of scheduling, it reported back "All NTFS boot sectors are unreadable or corrupt.  Chkdsk cannot continue."  Well, shit.  That can't be good.  A few minutes later, I got a BSOD (code 7A) which is apparently a disk-related hardware failure.  Interestingly, it still booted up fine after that, despite the stuff about the unreadable boot sector.  It was getting late, so since the system was still up and running I set a fresh data backup onto my other systems to go overnight and went to sleep.

 

Next morning I ran bootrec /fixmbr.  It said operation completed successfully.  Then I ran a whole suite of anti-everything programs just in case, Malwarebytes, JRT, ComboFix, the whole bit.  Didn't turn up anything interesting (which I didn't expect them to, since I hardly ever download anything or browse anywhere other than a few mainstream sites, but you never know).  Really is just a random OS problem I guess...

 

After the reboot from ComboFix, I tried to schedule Chkdsk again, and it was successful this time.  So I rebooted the system again, and Chkdsk ran, but it finished in less than half a second, I'm not kidding.  I could hardly even read the screen, but I saw it finished all 5 stages.  Clearly it was not operating correctly.

 

So, the system still booted up, so I continued to use it (because I have things to do) and suddenly when I tried to load an image to edit, it didn't load.  No error messages, just doesn't load up.  It's close to 8K resolution so I figured it might just be taking a while to load up, but after half a minute I tried to open up resource monitor to look at the disk activity, and see if it was really just opening it up still, or stalled for some reason.  I have a resource monitor shortcut in my start menu, and when I clicked it, it gave that missing file error that you get when the program that the shortcut leads to has been deleted.  Strange.  So I started typing cmd into the start menu so I could run sfc /scannow, but nothing appeared.  I opened the run prompt, and told it to open cmd.exe.  No such file exists.    After the next shutdown, the system could no longer boot into Windows (winload.exe missing).

 

Used installation DVD to run repair tools.  Tried running sfc from there, but it said there was a startup repair pending, and I needed to restart and run sfc again, but it says the same thing after restart.  I ran Startup Repair which failed, and system restore (totally out of its league here, but might as well),  Ran a chkdsk from the DVD too since it's no longer the active disk and doesn't have to reboot to do it (so I could see the results in the command line instead of it going away and continuing to boot the OS like last time).  Again chkdsk finished in a half-second, and apparently didn't find anything.  Rebuildbcd command detects 0 Windows installations (yeah at this point I'm just typing in every command I know).

 

So... any ideas? Probably beyond repair at this point huh...

[Flyguygamer]

Just reinstall and start over.

[T.Vengeance]

Whoa...not that this helps, but those problems just keep on snowballing...

[Ssoele]

China called, they want their wall back.

 

But seriously, your best option is to reinstall. You might be able to fix it for now, but you don't know what this was affected. A clean install will solve almost all of our problems, it's just a bit of a pain in the ass.

[Andrew0472]

[qwertywarrior]

make an image  (ISO)

format the SSD

install the image

 

pretty sure an image wont carry over the corruption issues

i might be wrong

[Glenwing]

Yeah, I figured it would be nice if I could get it running one more time even if it was just a band-aid fix, and do a Windows Easy Transfer to a dummy account on another machine so I could basically save a backup of my settings and stuff too before I wipe it, since it's a pain to do all that again... Oh well

[Glenwing]

Whoa...not that this helps, but those problems just keep on snowballing...

 

Hehe.  The whole time, I had this sinking feeling that I only had a limited number of reboots left, aaaaaaaand I was right.

[Glenwing]

make an image  (ISO)

format the SSD

install the image

 

pretty sure an image wont carry over the corruption issues

i might be wrong

 

Thanks, I'll give it a shot

[qwertywarrior]

Thanks, I'll give it a shot

 

if u didnt know windows has that utility built in u dont need to install anything

[AlwaysFSX]

Could get a priest to do an exorcism on your computer and see if that works

[Guest]

Backup your savegames!

[MG2R]

If it isn't too late already, boot the system into Linux form a USB drive. Check out C:\Windows. If the files are actually missing, it's highly likely that some virus went in for the kill. You could try an AVG rescue disk to scan for virusses/malware, if you haven't already.

[Blake]

FYI, you can get disk i/o errors and still have a verified SMART status.

 

EDIT: Clarification: Faulty HDD/Sata port/SataCable etc

[mr moose]

Are these likely to be symptoms of a dodgy SSD?  I can't think of a reason (outside of virus which you've already checked) that files would just disappear.

[ThorBuildingLegos]

Are these likely to be symptoms of a dodgy SSD?  I can't think of a reason (outside of virus which you've already checked) that files would just disappear.

 

That's a maybe, but S.M.A.R.T status will tell you if the read/write fails consistently and should catch this. But there are other tools that can help you assess if the SSD is in effect broken. I suggest downloading Hiren's BootCD from another computer and putting it on a USB stick or burning it to CD or something (I suggest searching for a torrent, since you can find a USB livecd creator and Hiren BootUSB with all the trimmings plus updated software and several other helpfull applications as well in regards to system or data recovery - as an alternative FalconFour's BootUSB includes Hiren's BootCD and includes several other applications, which is good because we want to use the tools that are optimal for this specific job on the low level (DOS) rather than high-level (Windows). Then boot off it and try some of the analytical tools provided to see if your SSDs, HDDs or RAM are malfunctioning in some way (these tests have to last a while.. in particular the memtest86 needs to be run for 24hrs to yield any credible results). You can do an analysis of the NTFS filesystems and the partition schemes to see if there are any apparent reasons for boot failure.

 

But tbh some low level driver or software can be responsible for causing these problems, which includes a corrupt partition scheme (visa vi not any partition but the structure around it). Some low-level driver/service could've overwritten the first few bites outside of the NTFS partition. This tends to happen and can be rectified, but you will in most cases lose some files - but usually just system files, that can evt be replaced using the windows recovery tool. I'd first backup the _entire_ partition scheme (you can do this using cfdisk, parted, gdisk) and filesystems in to disk images (mbr/gpt and /efi partition, system rescue, etc, all the parts). Then I'd try fixing it with some tools that WILL write to the partition scheme and filesystems to attempt fixing the problem and it can fail (which is why we made the backup). If it still doesn't boot then you can try to make a new partition scheme and put the old NTFS partition in to that scheme. We include all the partitions that the OS had available previously and run windows recovery to install lost system files

 

Or, alternatively, which I suggest in most cases: backup the partitions, try to make them mountable, or failing that, recover the most important files using a data recovery program (there are plenty to choose from on Hiren's BootUSB) and initialize the harddrive partition scheme using something like parted/cfdisk (LinuX on Hiren BOotCD) for BIOS or gdisk for (U)EFI and then finally reinstall Windows.

 

The latter is probably the easiest and most effective way of fixing the problem as it can possibly eliminate whatever software caused the corruption in the first place, like viruses or faulty drivers.

 

But... dose errors. I'd run a complete analytical check on your computer, inside out. Use the analytical software in Hiren's BootUSB or FalconFour's BootUSB (memtest86 for 24 hours at least), there are some HDD brand specific health status tools, and some other generic file system testing tools, harddrive testing/benchmarking/torture test, and also check your SATA/PCIe/M.2 ports to see if they are faulty and the wires as well, as prescribed by Blake. Begin from the bottom and work your way up.

Edited January 8, 2014 by ThorBuildingLegos