System Froze and Crashed while doing nothing?

[CraigHappy]

Hi Guys

I have a very strange one here.
My friends system was freezing or crashing with the (Blue Screen of Death). It was fine while he worked on it, but as soon as he left it for a few mins, it would go!

His son had set up an admin user account for every member of the family and I'd heard that was a great thing to do, so I told him to change all but one to Limited accounts, which he did.
After restart this showed - 'DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER'.

So I had him leave the machine with me, I popped in a win98 boot disk and at the a:> prompt types 'fdisk /mbr'.
on restart that took me straight back into windows.
I logged into his account and then left it for half an hour, on my return there was a black screen showing 'DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER'.

So I did the fdisk /mbr again, which got me back into windows, drefragged the harddrive, ran Adaware and Spybot on all the accounts and it worked great for 3 days with being left on, having loads of programs running at the same time and being left doing nothing for hours on end.
Until I came to take it back to him, plugged it all in and then just got the black screen with 'DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER' again.

Did the fdkisk /mbr yet again and left him with it running happily in windows.

I'm worried it will go again at some point, but I have no idea why, can anyone shine any light on this one?

Sorry it's a bit long winded, but I needed to explain the process!

Many thanks, Happy

 

[stduc]

What's the O/S?

I would suspect one of two things at this point.

Corrupt or failing hard drive.

Run a chkdsk C: /f /v /r

Malware of some kind.

Install if you haven't an antivirus program there are many free ones that are good - Avira, AntiVir and AVG spring to mind. Visit hijackthis.de and install it and use the free online report.

Report back here.


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When I was single I looked for miss right. It wasn't until after I married her I discovered her first name was always.

 

[CraigHappy]

Hi

Thanks for the response.

Sorry, it's running win xp home, just realised I enter the question in the xp pro forum.

I also forgot to say that the harddrive it only a month old and I ran seagate's own harddrive check software, and as well as running spinrite v6 on it and both checked out fine.

I also installed a more advanced spyware checker 'XoftSpy' and that only through back a few low risk cookie entries.

Also did a full virus scan with Mcafee V8 pro and it found nothing.

Cheers, Happy

 

[stduc]

So, did you mean to say you ran fixmbr from a 98 CD - or from the home CD?

I would suggest a run of chkdsk - are you using NTFS or FAT?

If Spinrite says the disk is OK it most likely is.

I would still use hijackthis though - as it free & doesn't take long.

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When I was single I looked for miss right. It wasn't until after I married her I discovered her first name was always.

 

[CraigHappy]

I booted to a win98 floppy boot disk to get the a: prompt and then typed fdisk /mbr.
I was told a long time ago, that will clear the MBR and upon retarting the new MBR would be created, that certainly seemed to happen when I did this, I think?

The drive is NTFS.
If I do the chkdsk from within windows xp, it will do it next time it restarts, will that be the same as requesting it by booting to the XP CD?

Yes good idea about running hijackthis, if the system fails again, I'll get the machine back over and run that.

Cheers, Happy

 

[stduc]

I am not sure whether the fdisk version does the same thing exactly as the recovery console. You may want to try the recovery console anyway.

Take a look at:-

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/.../proddocs/en-us/bootcons_fixmbr.mspx?mfr=true

The issue with running from within XP is that you only get to see the results briefly. There is also a summary logged to the event log.

Thinking about it - you may get some clues in the event logs anyway as to what has been going on.

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When I was single I looked for miss right. It wasn't until after I married her I discovered her first name was always.

 

[BadBigBen]

Another thing to check, is the IDE or SATA Cable...

loose or damaged cables can cause exactly the symptoms you described...


Ben

"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."