BSOD/Bios not detecting harddisk/Windows freezing

[Drolgin Steingrinder]

Hopefully someone can help me out...

My desktop machine all of a sudden started freezing after less than 2 minutes after starting windows. No error message, just freezing. The only change I'd made was download a custom map for WC3 - the crash in WC3 was the first occurrence.

I figured maybe the problem was a windows/driver fuckup, so I attempted to run the repair console - and it froze. Following that, POST would take 40-50 seconds longer than usual and it was a crapshoot whether I'd get into windows at all. I checked my bios settings without changing anything, and all of a sudden the damn thing wouldn't recognize my harddrives.

I finally got it to recognize one of the drives roughly half the time, but now it gets to the Windows loading screen, pops a BlueScreenOfDeath for a tenth of a second and then shuts down.

Any ideas?

I should say that before this happened the computer had been running two *huge* torrent files (~40 and ~60 gigs respectively) for a week straight.

[Aslanna]

Sounds like a bad drive to me.

[Winnow]

I should say that before this happened the computer had been running two *huge* torrent files (~40 and ~60 gigs respectively) for a week straight.

Continuous torrenting is brutal on hard drives.

http://www.tipoftheday.info/tips/6-step ... nt-damage/

2. Try to avoid download files for too long

BT download lunatics often drove all night the day the station and it is in fact the download. This situation has led to hard disk temperature is too high, accelerated aging and its fatigue. Now that the 7200 high-speed hard disk to the heat is great. Chassis to the heat conditions are not good, then the worse plight. So I usually do not exceed 12 hours for any bt download. You can also consider adding a a better fan for your hard disk to keep off the fan.

[Drolgin Steingrinder]

Thanks, that's what I was afraid of. Any suggestions as to how I might salvage a tiny bit of my stolen stuff as well as 3 years of academic work?

[Neost]

If the drive won't stay up long enough for you to copy as much as you can cleanly retrieve, the only option is expensive. There are data recovery services that will take your hard drive apart in a clean room environment and hook the platters up in a working drive and recover your data.

No clue what it costs these days, but I had to get a 500mb IDE drive recovered for a VP of Finance once in about 95/96. IIRC, it was about 3k to recover that one and it only had about 200mb on it. We got the data back in several boxes of 3.5" floppies that had like 120 floppies per box. I then had to plug each floppy into a working PC and copy any files I could off them. Of course these days you'd probably get your data back on a couple of CD's or DVD's.

[Zaelath]

Doesn't really sound like the disk is completely FUBAR, you could try one of the various data recovery utilities with the disk installed in another computer as a secondary hard drive. Getdataback (http://www.runtime.org/) or Kernel Recovery for Windows (http://www.nucleustechnologies.com/) come to mind. They're both about $70-80USD depending on what format your partition is.

[Traz-KOE]

Before spending a bunch of money in any case, install the new drive and see if you can't copy any of the files over; it may be just too unstable to boot, but work well enough to transfer at least some data.

[Drolgin Steingrinder]

An update:

I got a new harddrive and managed to copy all the files over without a hitch. However, I'm still getting odd reboots. At first I got a machine_exception error, now I get intermittent freezing and crashes. I've checked my RAM and it doesn't seem to be that. Tried swapping video cards with a friend, same thing happened. Temperatures seem to be under control.
Any ideas? I'm really hoping I won't have to go out and buy a new mobo/processor...

[Fash]

When you say you copied the files over.... do you mean just data, or did you use the same install of windows?... And is the offending hard-drive now disconnected?

I would hope you're running a fresh install.

[Drolgin Steingrinder]

New install of windows with documents etc copied over to the (new) drive. Old drive isn't connected at all.

Same video card, psu, cpu, ram, peripherals. New win xp pro install.

[Fash]

I wish I had better advice for ya, but if you've already tested the ram and video card.... Take all the other peripherals out and see if it still happens. What other peripherals are you using anyways?

Maybe someone else has a better tip... There are diagnostic/stress test programs out there that may help, don't have a name off the top of my head, though.

[Drolgin Steingrinder]

Tried a few programs but none of them ran long enough for me to get anything! The machine crashes after ~2 minutes


Soundcard/external NIC both taken out

[Zaelath]

Try underclocking your memory/CPU.. does sound like a bad motherboard to me though. And when I say bad, I've seen boards where the entire batch can't run XP (one of the v1.0 gigabyte boards comes to mind).

[Aabidano]

Had something very similar with a bad power supply, everything was peachy until it started to take a load and warmed up a little bit, then the system would flake out.