Heavy Duty Windows Crash - worst I've seen, and now I need help :(

S

Spiffae

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 17, 2003
Messages
159
Hey all - been building and using PCs for 10+ years, so I'm no stranger to crashes. This one is new to me, and I'm trying to figure out the best way to approach it.

Windows XP (up-to-date) PC with about 2 year old hardware, including a 500gb caviar HDD. I was watching a flash video on Hulu.com with Google Chrome, and i switched in and out of full screen a couple times, when suddenly i had a hard crash. sound looped in about 1/4 second loops, video crashed, but the mouse still worked. I hit CTRL ALT DEL to get the task manager, and suddenly the machine un-froze. The task manager popper up, the video caught up to where it was, and then froze again. That one lasted only a few seconds, and then the task manager showed (unkown) next to every process running, and popped up a very serious message that I've never seen before saying "system shutdown - save all your work, the system has had an error and will be shut down in 60 seconds" (i'm paraphrasing - there may have been an error code too) anyway, as I was trying to figure out what was going on, the system crashed hard again, the countdown stopped, and I rebooted. I cycled the power, and booted it up, and here's what happened:

I got through the POST without problem. The windows logo showed, the nvidia drivers kicked in and slowed down my graphics card drivers, and I breathed a sigh of relief, and waited for windows. And waited. And waited. and nothing. At a certain point the little loading bar for windows freezes, and that's it.

Booted up into safe mode, and it freezes at the end of the long list of drivers - right before it would go into windows.

Put in my XP CD, and hit R to go to the recovery console, and get this - it says there is an error processing the directory info. Type CHKDSK, and it says there are unrecoverable errors. Essentially anything that boots off a CD can't see the HDD at all. If I say "let's install windows again, XP setup says that it can't see any old installs of windows, and offers to give me a new one.

Now if that were happening in isolation, I would think the HDD was shot or something, but the fact is that I can still just boot the machine, get windows loading to pop up, drivers to load, and then a hang, so the files and directories are still there - they are just deeply, deeply messed up. Something with adobe flash player, google chrome, and windows all had a big problem at the wrong moment, and something got overwritten or destroyed. What I want to know is what I should do to recover and move on.

Any ideas?
 
That's an administrative shutdown.. Normally happens when one stops a system process.
This is one WEIRD problem, my suggestion would be to stick the HD in another machine (I'm sure you have something) and see if you can read it as a slave drive, from there..
 
yeah, my thoughts too - I've got some data recovery software. gonna have to install windows on another drive i guess.
 
That's weird. I had a similar problem, but it was not able to let me install Windows at all. It found the HD, but not able to install.
 
If you have important files, consider a raw clone first to prevent further damage to them. As mentioned, you could try to slave it to pull files and then wipe clean.

Or boot into a Vista or 2008 based Windows PE to try to copy the files off over the network or to another drive. Then use its version of chkdsk to see if you can get better results than XP's chkdsk.
 
here's an update - I've managed to use the diskinternals boot CD (no access to the other SATA machine right now) and have verified that everything is still there on both partitions of the main drive. When looking at the drives from a preinstalled environment, everything is fine - which makes it all the weirder that windows can't see the drive when booting. I can make images onto my 1tb external and then just reinstall software i guess, but does anyone know of any possible ways to repair a windows install from a PE?
 
I don't know why I'm the only one suspecting it is your MBR. Maybe I've been working with computers too long. This is [H]Forum, right?
 
haha - i've been suspecting the same!

just worried, because messing with the MBR is a good way to quickly lose a lot of stuff. I'm hoping to do this safely, then go for a fix.

Weird thing is - the PE i'm using doesn't even show any problems at all with the drive. There's probably one byte somewhere that got mis-written holding all this stuff up, and I'm just gonna have to find it.
 
I only run XP on one out of many of my boxes. That's my MCE Box.

I know for sure with some boot tools you can successfully delete your fubar MBR, and load a default one that will boot you perfectly into windows.

I'm pretty sure you can find a freeware tool that can mess with the MBR, but I highly suggest ___ for the simple fact that I use it constantly at work, sometimes at home- and it works.
 
When you try to boot into safe mode, does it hang about the time it is loading mup.sys? I have seen this a couple times, and you are correct about it being a pain to fix.

If thats your problem, let me know I think I have fixed this a number of times with a bit of work and a bunch of luck.
 
Hiren's BootCD is a warez product and discussing it or recommending it for use is a no-no around here so...

If you suspect it's the MBR, boot off the XP CD, choose the Recovery Console option, wait for the prompt, select the installation, at the second prompt (should be the C: prompt) type:

fixmbr (and then press Enter)

type:

fixboot (and then press Enter)

If it says everything is ok, type exit, eject the CD, and then press Enter to reboot. That will rewrite the MBR and "fix" the XP bootloader or restore it with a fresh working copy.
 
Even though your files are still "there" and you can "boot" it doesn't mean the hard drive isn't going bad.

First thing first: BACKUP YOUR DATA WHILE YOU STILL CAN

Then start messing with it.

Also make sure your memory hasn't gone kaput for some reason. But to me, sounds like some sectors took a dump and caused your problem.
 
Thanks for the advice guys

gonna pull all my data off the drive today and then try the MBR fixes (just in case something goes wrong) - if that works, great. if not, then it'll be a fresh install of windows.
 
I would start one step farther back.

Run a memtest+ 2.1 CD

Run tests 3, 5, and 7 for 10 passes each.

If your screen isn t full of red errors, THEN clone the data, and then think about repairing the installation.

If your RAM is generating errors nothing you do from this point forward will be constructive.

Memtest+ is your friend, never build a computer without it.
 
You guys are making this guy go all over the place with suggesting these fixes.
Memory? NO.
HDD gone bad? NO.

It's the MBR. I put money on it.

Joe Average :I had no idea that the DiskInternals or Winternals (is that warez too?!) lawsuit confirmed that Hirens was warez. Thanks for the heads up though. Nice to see you're learning in your short time here already.
 
l337*g0at said:
You guys are making this guy go all over the place with suggesting these fixes.
Memory? NO.
HDD gone bad? NO.

It's the MBR. I put money on it.

Joe Average :I had no idea that the DiskInternals or Winternals (is that warez too?!) lawsuit confirmed that Hirens was warez. Thanks for the heads up though. Nice to see you're learning in your short time here already.
Click to expand...

joe isn't new here, he just has a new name.

Joe=bbz_ghost
 
Thanks for all the great advice folks, and don't worry about me, i'm only running around trying different fixes a little. I knew my memory was good, and was pretty sure I didn't have an HDD error, but to be safe I pulled everything from my 400 gig boot drive (two partitions) onto a 1TB external with the Diskinternals boot CD. I'm gonna try the recovery console fixmbr/fixboot now and I'll let you know.
 
Well, bad news. it's not the MBR - first of all I was suspicious, because the machine boots into the windows loader, so it seems to get past the MBR stuff which would be pre-NTFS, no?

Anyway, booted into the recovery console, which, as I said, can't even do a DIR or CHKDSK (it says it can't find a drive) typed fixmbr, and hit yes and it put on a new MBR, but then I typed fixboot, and it told me that there was no bootable drive found.

This is very odd, because using a preinstalled environment, I can see that all the files and folders are still there - they just somehow seem to have gotten lost to windows. Diskinternals can see them just fine. They've been copied just fine. The only thing that is having problems is windows - both in booting (it hangs while it boots) or installing (windows setup can't locate a previous install of windows).

I'm totally stumped, and not even sure that windows install would manage to properly format, partition, and install to this seemingly fine HDD.
 
l337*g0at said:
Joe Average :I had no idea that the DiskInternals or Winternals (is that warez too?!) lawsuit confirmed that Hirens was warez. Thanks for the heads up though. Nice to see you're learning in your short time here already.
Click to expand...

Actually, I've been "here" since a week after this forum went online, and even before that with the primary HardOCP site. This isn't my first account, bub, but thanks for making that assumption. :) bbz_Ghost, br0adband, and a few others over the years... I'm all over the place.

Anywho...

Considering that the Hiren's CD has:

Norton Partition Magic
Norton Ghost
Acronis Disk Director
Acronis True Image

and many other commercial products on it that are also part of it, anyone that thinks it's not a warez product needs to go back to school... but then again, most public school systems on the planet suck nowadays so I guess that's not a good idea either... ;)

To the OP:

So do a Repair Installation of XP. It'll simply install itself on top of the OS you've got in place already. You shouldn't have to do much else but your applications might require reinstallation as well when it's all done.

Worst case scenario: as others have noted, back that data up if you can access it and start over fresh. That's what I would recommend and actually do if this was a client box sitting on my bench. I learned a long time ago that it is highly inefficient and impractical in this day and age to waste time, effort, and patience troubleshooting such issues.

You could spend hours, days trying to figure out what the hell is wrong - or you can start over with a fresh installation in an hour or less, typically.

The choice is yours...
 
some good news, some bad news.

I pulled all the files off the drive using Disk Internals NTFS viewer - really handy tool!

I made a clean Bart PE disk and booted into that and ran a scandisk on the drive and found HUNDREDS of unreadable sectors - not just corrupt, but real bad sectors - most likely physical problems on the drive. I'm going to play it safe here and buy a couple new HDDs and just start from scratch - i've got copies of everything on my external - i just really hope this external is reliable for a couple days! :)

thanks again for all the help.
 
Have you even bothered to run the manufacturer's hard drive diagnostic in all of this? I mean, typically in light of potential hard drive related issues, that should be the very first thing anyone should be doing/running.

This stuff ain't rocket science... ;)
 
errrrr - well, in my defense I was almost certain it wasn't a hard drive issue - and now i feel like a jackass.
 
and in the "spiffae is stupid" category, i booted the diagnostic disk and it wouldn't even run the diagnostics due to a serious SMART error. so that drive is getting RMAed. dang
 
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