• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Persistant peculiar phenomena

A

Alyosha

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
May 1, 2003
Messages
1,884
I built a PC for my parents last year. Athlon II X4, Asus 785G board, 4 gigs RAM, 32 gig SSD + 500 WD platter drive, Win 7 Home Premium. Pretty run of the mill. Its given me ongoing, odd problems. Not long after building it the OS install got corrupted. Diagnostics showed no bad hardware so I figured, "parents, who knows what they do to this poor machine". Reinstalled and its been mostly fine.

Fast forward to now and they tell me that office applications won't start up. I gave it a try and, sure enough, Word and Excel don't start. I get the little blue spinning, "working" circle but launch. Instead of launching, though, "something odd" seems to happen and the display scheme goes from the typical areo theme to the "areo basic" with no transparency, etc. Soon after Windows begins to tell me that there are new updates to install but Windows Update crashes if I try to launch it to see what they are. It tells me it can't write to "such and such" memory upon trying to launch.

I thought that maybe it was a display driver type of issue and trying to uninstall ATI drivers results in the ATI software uninstaller crashing. Reloading chipset and display drivers does not help.

I thoroughly stumped as to what is going on here. Bad drivers, bad hardware.... Any insight would be greatly helpful.
 
Please check out the stickied "Basic Troubleshooting Guide" and report back after you've run all those tests.
 
Bad hard drive maybe.Most of the hdd manufacturers have a diagnostic tool you can run.
 
Alright, its been a while since I've dealt witht this but the PC got worse and worse and finally required an OS reinstall so I've got the computer at my home now and can actually work on it.

So, running through the tests recomended in the troubleshooting guide I find an error using HD Tune. I get an "Ultra DMA CMC Error Count" warning on a 32GB OCZ vertex SSD. From what I can tell, this makes perfect sense for the symptoms I was experiencing, slow data corruption and eventual destruction of the Windows installation.

Recomendations I've seen in a quick search say that it can be casued by a bad cable, which I'll try next but, if that doesn't work, how do I tell if this is caused by a bad drive, bad SATA port / SATA controller on the motherboard, or something else. Any instight on this problem would be much appreciated.
 
Do you have a spare drive? If so, install Windows in trial mode (don't enter the CD key) on that spare drive. See if the issues still occur.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top