Windows 7 disappears after a few days

[Bruce Dewey]

I have an HP Touchsmart 600 that had a hard drive failure. I replaced the hard drive, but due to the restore partition being on the fail hard drive, I had to purchase a new copy of Win 7 Pro. Upon installing Win 7 Pro, it went on fine, all updates went on, and computer operates perfectly for a few days. After a couple days, and a subsequent startup from being powered down, the operating system is no where to be found, and the POST keeps recycling. After reinstalling the new version of Win 7 Pro again, it is noted that the Windows.Old folder exists, which is the previous version of the Win 7 installation. This has happened multiple times, and I have no clue as to why it is happening. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

 

[Tom Tancredi]

WOW nice system, can't believe they are 4 years old now and at end of life to look to be replaced already! SIGH!

To me it sounds like either your having a building up heat problem that causes the drives (including new one) to fail OR the I/O controllers on the Mobo are dying painfully (aka new computer time).

Can you open the system up using the Computer Repair Guide (find them all the time for Dells) and check on the board for dust/etc? I would then monitor the heat on the HDD, CPU and GPU.

For future reference if POST keeps recycling that has nothing to do with Windows specifically, it is hard drive hey are you there - yes / no, do you have a boot partition - yes/no, etc. then finally hard drive load the OS located as you said. So reinstalling windows doesn't fix the hard drive.