Having problems, not sure if it's related to memory or not [NEED HELP]

[johnfoust49]

My brother has been having a problem lately and he asked if I could help him out. The past two months he's had a problem where windows crashes randomly or tells him errors have occurred and windows needs to repair. After many times of following the windows repair options he had to just reinstall windows. This has happened a couple of times and I just told he should get a new hard drive.

He went out and bought a hard drive. Now a month later after having no problems, windows has crash unexpectedly again. Its been saying 'run diagnostics' to fix the problem which usually leads to just endless waiting and nothing actually curing anything. He tried to do a restore point and it failed to find one. He said when he boots the pc it says something like 'please insert disk drive', then he plugs in his usb drive, that has windows 8.1 installed and it gives him some error.

Thankfully he can boot into the BIOS and reinstall windows again, but I was wondering two things. Is it possible to fix this issue without having to restore windows? He works from home on his desktop and it's just a pain to restore everything again. Also, is this a hard drive issue? I was thinking it was because of the errors telling him before about the hard drive, but he bought a brand new one a month. Is it a ram issue?

If anyone could help that'd be great.

 

[Herc08]

Use usally dianognistcs refers memory. You can run a Windows Memory Diagnostic and see if your RAM is good. If the USB stick is giving him the hard drive error, it is possible that the USB was not formatted correctly. I would recommend that upgrading to Windows 10 as well

 

[johnfoust49]

Use usally dianognistcs refers memory. You can run a Windows Memory Diagnostic and see if your RAM is good. If the USB stick is giving him the hard drive error, it is possible that the USB was not formatted correctly. I would recommend that upgrading to Windows 10 as well

Is it possible to run the test without signing into the account? from what he says he can't even get into windows.

 

[Herc08]

Use usally dianognistcs refers memory. You can run a Windows Memory Diagnostic and see if your RAM is good. If the USB stick is giving him the hard drive error, it is possible that the USB was not formatted correctly. I would recommend that upgrading to Windows 10 as well

Is it possible to run the test without signing into the account? from what he says he can't even get into windows.

Yes, do you have Windows installation media? You can run it, and instead of clicking Install now, click on Repair Windows

 

[johnfoust49]

Use usally dianognistcs refers memory. You can run a Windows Memory Diagnostic and see if your RAM is good. If the USB stick is giving him the hard drive error, it is possible that the USB was not formatted correctly. I would recommend that upgrading to Windows 10 as well

Is it possible to run the test without signing into the account? from what he says he can't even get into windows.

Yes, do you have Windows installation media? You can run it, and instead of clicking Install now, click on Repair Windows

Yes, I have a usb device with windows, but I just used my installation cd of windows 7. I ran the memory diagnostic and let it do 3 sweeps and it found no errors. I wasn't sure how long i should let the scan go.

 

[johnfoust49]

Use usally dianognistcs refers memory. You can run a Windows Memory Diagnostic and see if your RAM is good. If the USB stick is giving him the hard drive error, it is possible that the USB was not formatted correctly. I would recommend that upgrading to Windows 10 as well

Is it possible to run the test without signing into the account? from what he says he can't even get into windows.

Yes, do you have Windows installation media? You can run it, and instead of clicking Install now, click on Repair Windows

I have another question. I put in the windows 7 disc to install windows, but i didn't format the drive and selected the option to save files. The computer has been displaying text that says 'recovering orphaned file..' and alot of random stuff text after. It has been on-going for about 1 hour now. Is this normal?

 

[Herc08]

Save files? I'm not sure what you mean. Do you mean to just do an upgrade install?