- Mar 15, 2014
- 7
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- 10,510
Hi there, this is my first time posting on this forum. My self-built computer, which was running fine for years, recently experienced five random shut downs in addition to other unusual errors. I suspected that my hard drive was failing, so I checked it over and found some bad/pending sectors, so I'm replacing that with a new, much larger hdd. However, I'm wondering if something other than my hard drive is the real cause of my computer issues. I'm suspecting my power supply or maybe even my video card. Three times now I've tried installing Windows 7 on my new hard drive but it kept inevitably falling back into a startup repair loop. Yet when I go back to booting from my old drive's install of Windows 7 it starts fine. Would you give me your thoughts on all this?
SPECIFICATIONS:
STATE OF OLD HARD DRIVE:
After my fifth computer shutdown, I suspected that my hard drive was failing and investigated it:
RANDOM SHUTDOWN PROBLEMS:
I had five random shutdowns, which were all reported on the system event logs as being Event ID = 41, Source = Kernel-Power. The shutdowns were on:
OTHER PROBLEMS:
I often had short lags with my internet browsing and occasionally with other programs. My wife also told me that she heard a strange high-pitched sound coming from the computer several times. I haven't heard it myself because I can't hear very well in those frequencies.
During my investigations into my computer shutdowns, I looked in the System Event Logs to see what other error codes had come up. Some of them include:
System Event Log's Event ID
PROBLEMS CONTINUE WITH WINDOWS 7 INSTALL ON NEW HARD DRIVE:
I unplugged my old hard drive's data cable, and started up with just the new drive. I tried installing Windows 7 on my new hard drive with limited success. During my first attempt I managed to get to the point where I downloaded all of the windows updates indiscriminately and then upon restart, it kept cycling through startup repair. System restore wasn't successful either.
Second time I reinstalled Windows 7 I foolishly did it the same way and had the same result.
Then, for the third time, thinking it might have been a video card driver screwing things up, I tried a new install of Windows 7 while being very careful about installing the hardware drivers first, restarting after each one, to see if any of those were causing issues. Then I downloaded windows updates and security updates in small batches to see if any of those were causing issues, restarting after each batch. No problems then! I downloaded a few commonly used programs from Ninite and was feeling good about my install until later in the evening when I restarted the computer to doublecheck that everything was fine and my computer went back to startup repair hell like I described before. No ability to repair, no ability to restore from system restore. After a few more futile restarts, I got a new message saying "If you have recently attached a device to this computer, such as a camera or portable music player, remove it and restart your computer. ..."- in spite of my not having done such a thing.
Since my 3TB hard drive is brand new and seems to be working fine, I'm thinking that perhaps something else other than hard drive or software is causing my computer to act weird. I don't know why my old hard drive boots up fine into Windows 7, when my new hard drive doesn't seem to. And I'm concerned about some deeper issue with my computer because of the random shutdowns.
I don't know if this is really relevant to my current issues, but in the past year I had one or two unexpected power offs from power outages in the neighborhood. While I was converting VHS films-to-digital with a cheap USB converter cable and I had selected some setting in the Cyberlink Powerdirector program (don't remember what the setting was) and had immediate BSODs.
I'm anxious to have my computer in good reliable working order and would appreciate your thoughts as the possibility of my power supply or something else causing these strange issues and random power offs, as well as causing me trouble installing Windows 7 to my new hard drive. It's been immensely frustrating to me.
SPECIFICATIONS:
* Operating system: Windows 7 Home 64-bit
* Hard drive: Western Digital 1 TB Caviar Green WD10EADS (this seems to be failing and was out of warranty, so I'm replacing it with a new Western Digital 3 TB Black WD3003FZEX model)
* RAM: G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model F3-12800CL9D-4GBNQ
* CPU: AMD Athlon II X2 250 Regor 3.0GHz 2 x 1MB L2 Cache Socket AM3 65W Dual-Core Processor
* Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-MA790GPT-UD3H AM3 AMD 790GX HDMI ATX AMD Motherboard
* Video card: MSI R6570-MD1G/LP Radeon HD 6570 1GB 128-bit DDR3 PCI Express 2.1 x16 HDCP Ready Low Profile Ready Video Card
* Case: Rosewill Conqueror RPS-01-WB500P RT with a 500-watt power supply
STATE OF OLD HARD DRIVE:
After my fifth computer shutdown, I suspected that my hard drive was failing and investigated it:
* Western Digital's Data Lifeguard Tools quick test provided the following message: Quick Test on drive 1 did not complete! Status code = 07 (Failed read test element), Failure Checkpoint = 97 (Unknown Test)
* HDTune's Health window showed 2 pending sectors and 1 reallocated sector count
* When I ran chkdsk almost a year ago it reported 4 KB in bad sectors, saying it had replaced bad clusters in file 42736 of name \Windows\winsxs\amd64_microsoft.windows.gdiplus_6595b64144ccf1df_1.1.7601.17514_none_2b24536c71ed437a\GdiPlus.dll. I acquired a functional version of that .dll file & replaced it. Recently when I ran chkdsk, it reported 8 KB in bad sectors, saying it had replaced bad clusters in file 72505 of name \Windows\winsxs\AM6615~1.178\msi.dll. I have not fixed the msi.dll issue yet.
RANDOM SHUTDOWN PROBLEMS:
I had five random shutdowns, which were all reported on the system event logs as being Event ID = 41, Source = Kernel-Power. The shutdowns were on:
* 10/28/2013: BugcheckCode = 0, with all BugcheckParameters being 0x0.
* 1/26/2014: Two shutdowns that day. The first one was when my wife was about to put an MP3 player into the topside USB port. Her hand merely brushed the top of the case before actually plugging the player in, and she got a small static zap and the computer shut off. The other time that day I had left the computer alone idling for a while and came back to it turned off for no discernible reason. In both cases the event log said that the BugcheckCode = 0, with all BugcheckParameters being 0x0.
* 1/28/2014: I don't recall why it shutdown this time, but I think it may have been related to my messing around with VHS-to-digital conversion. Here is the 1-28-2014 minidmp file
* 3/10/2014: After installing my new 3 TB hdd in its case, I turned on the computer by booting off the old hard drive so I could see if my new hard drive was working properly. I ended up giving the new drive a drive letter & formatting it. I happened to press my hand on top of the computer case, and it may be only coincidence, but just then the computer suddenly displayed a blue screen with “BUGCODE_USB_DRIVER, error 0x000000FE.” At the time nothing was plugged into the computer excepting the standard mouse, keyboard & monitor. Here is the 3-10-2014 minidmp file.
OTHER PROBLEMS:
I often had short lags with my internet browsing and occasionally with other programs. My wife also told me that she heard a strange high-pitched sound coming from the computer several times. I haven't heard it myself because I can't hear very well in those frequencies.
During my investigations into my computer shutdowns, I looked in the System Event Logs to see what other error codes had come up. Some of them include:
System Event Log's Event ID
* 7 = The device, \Device\Harddisk0, has a bad block. (lots of those!)
* 11 = Atapi - The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Ide\IdePort0 (lots of those!)
* 51 = Warning: “An error was detected on device \Device\CdRom0 during a paging operation.”
* 219 = “The driver \Driver\WUDFRd failed to load for the device USB\VID.....” or “The driver \Driver\kbdhid failed to load for the device HID\VID”
PROBLEMS CONTINUE WITH WINDOWS 7 INSTALL ON NEW HARD DRIVE:
I unplugged my old hard drive's data cable, and started up with just the new drive. I tried installing Windows 7 on my new hard drive with limited success. During my first attempt I managed to get to the point where I downloaded all of the windows updates indiscriminately and then upon restart, it kept cycling through startup repair. System restore wasn't successful either.
Second time I reinstalled Windows 7 I foolishly did it the same way and had the same result.
Then, for the third time, thinking it might have been a video card driver screwing things up, I tried a new install of Windows 7 while being very careful about installing the hardware drivers first, restarting after each one, to see if any of those were causing issues. Then I downloaded windows updates and security updates in small batches to see if any of those were causing issues, restarting after each batch. No problems then! I downloaded a few commonly used programs from Ninite and was feeling good about my install until later in the evening when I restarted the computer to doublecheck that everything was fine and my computer went back to startup repair hell like I described before. No ability to repair, no ability to restore from system restore. After a few more futile restarts, I got a new message saying "If you have recently attached a device to this computer, such as a camera or portable music player, remove it and restart your computer. ..."- in spite of my not having done such a thing.
Since my 3TB hard drive is brand new and seems to be working fine, I'm thinking that perhaps something else other than hard drive or software is causing my computer to act weird. I don't know why my old hard drive boots up fine into Windows 7, when my new hard drive doesn't seem to. And I'm concerned about some deeper issue with my computer because of the random shutdowns.
I don't know if this is really relevant to my current issues, but in the past year I had one or two unexpected power offs from power outages in the neighborhood. While I was converting VHS films-to-digital with a cheap USB converter cable and I had selected some setting in the Cyberlink Powerdirector program (don't remember what the setting was) and had immediate BSODs.
I'm anxious to have my computer in good reliable working order and would appreciate your thoughts as the possibility of my power supply or something else causing these strange issues and random power offs, as well as causing me trouble installing Windows 7 to my new hard drive. It's been immensely frustrating to me.
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