What's Going on with Windows?

[brianlmitchell]

ASUS P8Z68-V LE
Intel i5 2500K
120GB OCZ Vertex 3
60GB OCZ Vertex 3
1TB Barricuda HDD
Windows 7 Home Premium

OLD SETUP:

had operating system installed on 120GB SSD, and games on the HDD. Had 60GB SSD caching with Intel Smart Response tech for HDD.

Everythings been going fine with this new computer, other than the strange sleep mode issue where I can't waken my computer, but other than that everythings been going great until this morning.

Last night, there were no issues with the computer, or any games that I've been playing. No crashes, and windows shut down normally before I went to bed. This morning, Windows fails to load.

I couldn't use a restore point, at the end of choosing a point to restore to, I couldn't click finish because "System Recovery" was not enabled on my C:\ Never seen that before... Also, I couldn't use a system image I put on the HDD because the HDD was not being detected, thus hiding my system image files.

NEW SETUP:
So I decided to just start fresh. Instead of going RAID I decided to go AHCI and forget the ISR technology. Now I'm throwing the system on my 60GB SSD, games on 120GB SSD. Partitioned the HDD with a 200GB for system image backups, 800GB for misc stuff.

So, here I am installing/updating all my system stuff on my 60GB SSD. And finally, after about 2 hours into this, the last drivers installed, Windows fails to load again! I hadn't even the chance to create a new image with this new setup, which is typically what I do before I start intalling games... Only this time I was able to restore to a point just after I formated/partitioned the other drives. I have hours of system/driver updates again, and I'm afraid to even do it now.

This is really frustrating me now.

Computer's been running fine for almost a month now, but this morning without warning, Windows mysteriously decides to stop loading. SSD is out of the question because this same thing has happened on a completely different SSD. What else could be the problem?

And to specify the type of error, Windows will attempt to load like normal but will quickly crash with a blue screen flash. And it will just keep doing that.

 

[roald]

Could be different things. driver incompatibility with your SSD like i had with intel R10 drivers and my Vertex2. OCZ warns about it but hadnt read it.
Make sure you have the latest firmware.
A speedtest with AS SSD may show if there is a problem with a drive itself.

 

[brianlmitchell]

Think I've narrowed down the culprit, at least what was behind the system load failure after updating/installing all drivers just now. Had a 3rd Windows load failure after using Driver Manager to install "Intel(R) 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family 6 Port SATA AHCI Controller - 1C02"

I was caught by surprise during the 2nd load failure, but I'm 99% sure it happened after installing this because it shows up last to be installed on Driver Manager.

This is odd because about a month ago I used Driver Manger to update all the drivers etc, I installed everything with no hitches. For now I'm avoiding this driver until I know further whats wrong here.

Avoiding this driver may work for now, but how long? Still a mystery what caused a seemingly normal system to fail out of no where this morning...

 

[roald]

If you want to be sure, you can use F8 just before windows boot time so you get the menu to have windows boot in safe mode. There is a safe mode option that let's you choose to load a driver or not. This is tedious but lets you see what gets loaded and which is the culprit if windows fails to continue loading it after you allow that particular driver to load.