Windows booting issues

Ace Pace · Post by **Ace Pace** » 2007-10-23 05:07am

My PC has been acting up for the past day, every 30 minutes or so, mouse would freeze(Windows would keep functioning), then return to normal.

Suddenly it froze up, watching Youtube. Restarts now have Windows loading, getting stuck, and rebooting the PC. Getting to a BSOD screen gave an utterly random error code with a random error adress and no further information such as what module failed.

Memtest running from an ubuntu LiveCD revealed a single RAM adress(at the 492MB range, so high up) that has a small bug, but nothing bigger then that. Knoppix and uBuntu both seem to run fine, though Knoppix froze up randomly. Stressing the RAM beyond that sector in uBuntu didn't make anything odd happen.

Not sure if to just reinstall windows, or play around with RAM sticks.

Bounty · Post by **Bounty** » 2007-10-23 05:12am

How long did you leave memtest running?

Ace Pace · Post by **Ace Pace** » 2007-10-23 05:19am

Bounty wrote:How long did you leave memtest running?

30 minutes or so, it had finshed one pass by then and only found that bugged sector. You want me to run it for 12 hours?

Post by **Edi** » 2007-10-23 05:24am

Try another RAM stick. If that doesn't clear the issue, inspect your motherboard. A flaking motherboard can cause all of the described behavior, among other things.

Ace Pace · Post by **Ace Pace** » 2007-10-23 08:44am

I tried switching around RAM sticks, ended up finding the one with the bad sector. However, booting with differant RAM brought no differant results. Windows still has issues booting.

I checked the mobo, nothing screams wrong, as in, all those little tower thingies still seem normal and theres no odd peices flying around. I actually stumbled across a pair of differant possible issues but which are completly unrelated(slow transfare speeds on secondary IDE channel).

Any other suggestions? Repair? Reinstall? Format C and install from blank?

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2007-10-23 10:11am

If you've had faulty RAM in there for a while, it may have damaged the partition. Often drives from 'bad RAM' systems will be riddled with errors.

Ace Pace · Post by **Ace Pace** » 2007-10-23 12:50pm

Stark wrote:If you've had faulty RAM in there for a while, it may have damaged the partition. Often drives from 'bad RAM' systems will be riddled with errors.

I'll try running some checkdisk thingy from the windows recovery console thingy, but I don't think thats the issue, I mean...it loads, and loaded fine up untill that problem.

EDIT: odd windows recovery console decided windows is installed in another partition entirely, that chkdsk was fine. Going to disconnect that drive and force it to deal with the real windows install.

Netko · Post by **Netko** » 2007-10-23 02:07pm

IIRC recovery console assigns letters to partitions on its own, not checking the installed windows disk configuration leading to possible tumbling around of drive letters, especially if you have SATA drives and IDE drives mixed (SATA tend to be dumped after IDE). So that shouldn't be an issue.

As far as your problems go, its one of those weird could be anything things. RAM, MB, PSU, hell even a dying HD are all potential causes, although I'm leaning towards RAM. Please check the event log and see what errors you're getting there (system) - considering your issues there should be a lot of them. That could possibly at least narrow it down. I'm assuming this is a desktop - if it is somehow a laptop, removing the battery thus forcing a hard reset should be the first thing to do.

Ace Pace · Post by **Ace Pace** » 2007-10-23 05:33pm

I'd love to check the event log, if it would boot!

Bounty · Post by **Bounty** » 2007-10-23 05:37pm

Ace Pace wrote:I'd love to check the event log, if it would boot!

Can't you manually fetch it with a livecd? Assuming that still boots.

ETA: think they're in windows/system32/config/*vent.evt - sys*, app* and sec*. I assume those are plaintext or at least legible, unless Microsoft decided to screw you over a bit more.

ETA2: forget it, just checked and they're either not the logs or Mousepad can't make sense of them. Sorry.

Netko · Post by **Netko** » 2007-10-23 07:18pm

Ace Pace wrote:I'd love to check the event log, if it would boot!

Sorry, I misunderstood your OP. I thought that you could boot into Windows but that you get a crash very soon afterwards.

Ace Pace · Post by **Ace Pace** » 2007-10-24 04:06am

Bounty wrote:
Ace Pace wrote:I'd love to check the event log, if it would boot!
Can't you manually fetch it with a livecd? Assuming that still boots.

ETA: think they're in windows/system32/config/*vent.evt - sys*, app* and sec*. I assume those are plaintext or at least legible, unless Microsoft decided to screw you over a bit more.

ETA2: forget it, just checked and they're either not the logs or Mousepad can't make sense of them. Sorry.

Didn't notice ETA2 and tried it anyway, yeah, unreadable.

Netko · Post by **Netko** » 2007-10-24 06:26am

You could copy them and open them up on a functioning computer - Event Viewer seems to have an open file functionality, although I never used it.

Vista does have a slight advantage here in that its event files are stored in XML, so at least MS is moving away from binary data. No help for you unfortunately.

Glocksman · Post by **Glocksman** » 2007-10-24 10:45am

Ace Pace wrote:
Stark wrote:If you've had faulty RAM in there for a while, it may have damaged the partition. Often drives from 'bad RAM' systems will be riddled with errors.
I'll try running some checkdisk thingy from the windows recovery console thingy

I love it when you use technical jargon.

Seriously though, have you tried using any of your HD manufacturer's disk checking utilities to see if it's a physical problem with the drive, or just errors caused by your bad RAM?

Also, are you overclocking?

Ace Pace · Post by **Ace Pace** » 2007-10-24 10:58am

Glocksman wrote:
Ace Pace wrote:
Stark wrote:If you've had faulty RAM in there for a while, it may have damaged the partition. Often drives from 'bad RAM' systems will be riddled with errors.
I'll try running some checkdisk thingy from the windows recovery console thingy
I love it when you use technical jargon.
Seriously though, have you tried using any of your HD manufacturer's disk checking utilities to see if it's a physical problem with the drive, or just errors caused by your bad RAM?

Also, are you overclocking?

I can acess every file from any of my LiveCDs, and chkdsk turned up nothing. I currently tried booting up with the non-bugged RAM, still nothing.
OCing..nah, hell, I tried bringing RAM speeds down to only 200mhz, going single channel, killing timings, nothing there. I'm off now to boot it up and copy the event logs to this machine.

Ace Pace · Post by **Ace Pace** » 2007-10-24 11:07am

Ah, predictable, or not, since i'm not sure if copying this thing was done properly, uBuntu was whining. But long story short, the log file seems to be corrupted.

System and application files that is. Internet(I.E IE7 log) is fine(and empty). Security log is also corrupted.

WTF? Again, I very much doubt this is a HD problem given there had been zero problems leading up to this and it completed a recent chkdsk(2 weeks ago) with no problems, and the RAM has been there for 2 years.

Ace Pace · Post by **Ace Pace** » 2007-10-24 11:44am

*sighs* Just to confirm, I booted up the windows recovery console thingy, and checked stuff. After erroring once in trying to display the root contents of C, I ran a chkdsk, after that, it displayed everything fine.

Anything else I should be trying there? I'm currently about to burn the 'Ultimate boot CD' to try and and run a diagnostic on the Raptor that is my main hard drive.

Xisiqomelir · Post by **Xisiqomelir** » 2007-10-24 06:43pm

Ace Pace wrote:Anything else I should be trying there? I'm currently about to burn the 'Ultimate boot CD' to try and and run a diagnostic on the Raptor that is my main hard drive.

I've never tried that one, but I like the TRK recovery disk. It has mountallfs, tar and netcat for rescuing files off a drive before reformatting.

Ace Pace · Post by **Ace Pace** » 2007-10-25 03:41am

Odd circumstances of the day, it booted. Why? I'm not sure. The only things I did since that post was run a diagnostic on the Raptor that said zero errors, and burn off the App_data folder.
A restart made it go through the windows boot procedure then a black screen, which was just odd, so I let it sleep overnight, morning I boot it up and I get the login window. Event log says nothing, the machine says nothing.