Windows won't boot, bsod on startup

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gazzer
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Windows won't boot, bsod on startup

Post by gazzer » Wed Mar 05, 2008 1:12 pm

For the past few days my pc has been randomly crashing, ie. hanging then needed to be turned off at the power because it is unresponsive, especially when playing games (mainly Counter-Strike Source) or using Reaper (audio software similar to Cubase/ProTools). On restart, it kept running chkdsk on my E:\ drive (a partition containing an unused install of XP in case my main C:\ installation is unaccessible).

Today, a warning kept popping up about C:\$Extend\UsnJrnl is not able to be written to or something, and told me to run chkdsk, and after a minute or two, the pc froze again. Now, whenever I try to boot into my main C:\ install of windows, it blue screens before it even gets to the login screen, and when I try and boot into my spare install on the E:\ drive, it says hal.dll is missing. I don't even have the error code because the BSOD only remains on screen for a split second, then my pc restarts.

So, I tried to boot from my XP CD to perform a repair, but it doesn't offer the option of repairing. It doesn't even recognise my C:\ drive as an install of Windows; it just thinks it is an unknown partition. When I try to install another copy of Windows to boot into, it tells me that the C:\ drive is unrecognised and must be formatted before I can install Windows, which I don't want to do because I'll almost definitely lose everything then.

The C:\ drive is the whole of a 500gb HD, and the E:\ drive is a 5gb partition on an 80GB HD. There is also a D:\ drive on the 80gb which contains the C:\ installs page file.

Any ideas?

EDIT - I disabled restart on system failure so I could get the STOP code, which is 0x00000024 - this has been covered in this thread here already: techspot.com/vb/topic5352.html

I will try and resolve my problem using the answers in that thread as well.
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Shotokan101
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Post by Shotokan101 » Wed Mar 05, 2008 3:05 pm

Symptoms sound like you've been having disk problems for a while and it's finally given up the ghost.... :cry:
Jim

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Post by gazzer » Wed Mar 05, 2008 5:25 pm

They were both brand new, unused HDs haha!

Either way, it's sorted :D

I managed to log in to my E:\ XP install in the recovery console and I ran chkdsk on c:\ and it fixed it!

So happy hehe
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Post by Shotokan101 » Wed Mar 05, 2008 5:27 pm

Good News - might be a good idea check the disk regularly over the next few weeks just in case....
Jim

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Post by Alan » Wed Mar 05, 2008 5:43 pm

gazzer wrote:They were both brand new, unused HDs haha!

Either way, it's sorted :D

I managed to log in to my E:\ XP install in the recovery console and I ran chkdsk on c:\ and it fixed it!

So happy hehe
Ha, I have just had 2 HDD go down on a brand new Dell laptop 8 hours old and both drives died!!
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Post by gazzer » Sat Mar 08, 2008 7:02 pm

unlucky alan!

shoto, I also found another problem - loose SATA cable.... that'll be why it randomly used to freeze I guess..!
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Post by Shotokan101 » Sun Mar 09, 2008 2:21 am

gazzer wrote:unlucky alan!

shoto, I also found another problem - loose SATA cable.... that'll be why it randomly used to freeze I guess..!
...I call that "User Error" Gazzer :D
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Post by erador » Mon Apr 21, 2008 3:10 pm

Yup always SATA, never had these problems with IDE.
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