Have to reinstall Vista every two months

[jjhuopa]

Hi, I would appreciate some help or ideas here. Last christmas I built a computer for a relative with Vista Ultimate 32-bit. I had some trouble finding the right bios settings in the beginning but I think I already figured them out. The problem now is that the computer works fine for about two months then out of the blue the system drive goes corrupt! It has happened now three or four times even though I've installed Windows correctly (first OS, latest service pack, updates, chipset driver from motherboards site, other system drivers then the newest drivers for other components, programs), I have taken care of chkdsk's and defragmentations. Any idea of what is hosing the system? Some incompatibility issue? The specs: Vista Ultimate 32-bit with sp2, Asus P5Q, Intel C2D E8500, 2 gb Kingston valueram (from qvl), MSI ATI Radeon hd4850, 150 gb WD Velociraptor as system drive, 750 gb Samsung sataII drive for files, Creative SB X-fi XtremeMusic, Terratec 2400i DT tv-card, WD MyBook Home Edition 1 tb backup drive, 24" HP monitor connected with dvi, LG Bluray, usb floppy, Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse. Avira Antivirus, Windows firewall, Windows Defender and Spanfighter in use. I can post specific models if necessary. PC Complete backup has saved me from a few reinstalls.. My relative uses the Administrator account for ease of use. The computer had shutdown problems, but otherwise no big symptoms until the system just suddenly goes corrupt.. What I want to know is this a problem with Vista, the hardware or the user, because I have installed dozens of Windows systems succesfully before..

[ɹəuəllıʍ ʇɐb]

Can you be a little bit more specific what you mean by "the system drive goes corrupt"? What are the symptoms?

Unlike Windows 9x, modern operating systems do not need to be reinstalled on a regular basis; there is definitely something wrong.

Anyway, apart from finding out the reason for the corruption, backing up all data on a computer is easy, and will prevent the need to reinstall everything.

[Emilio123]

Hi:jjhuopa

I have the same problem like you ,that's boring!

but my friend help me fix this

I wil ask him how to do this

[Raddy]

If I were to venture a guess, you may be treating the wrong symptom. In my experience, drive corruption is caused by improperly shutting down the computer. During normal operation, your hard drive will get information faster than it can write it to the disks, so it puts it into its cache, which is a small bit of RAM in the hard drive. Like normal memory, when the drive loses power, anything that is in the RAM is immediately lost, so if Windows had some system critical file in the cache, that information would be lost which could corrupt the system. You mentioned that it doesn't always shut down properly; how often does this happen? Does anything precipitate it not shutting down right, like a Windows update?

[jjhuopa]

Can you be a little bit more specific what you mean by "the system drive goes corrupt"? What are the symptoms?

Unlike Windows 9x, modern operating systems do not need to be reinstalled on a regular basis; there is definitely something wrong.

Anyway, apart from finding out the reason for the corruption, backing up all data on a computer is easy, and will prevent the need to reinstall everything.

With the system drive going corrupt I mean unsuccesful boot, either neverending boot or the booting to a graphically corrupt desktop: the theme changes to Vista basic and then crashes. After installing Vista sp2 the computer had shutdown problems, the shutdown would not complete even if left running over night, had to shut down manually. That might have been solved with a firmware update for the WD MyBook Home Edition (shutdown has worked after that). Other symptoms: explorer crashes pretty often, the windows reliability score has gone down to 2 or 3 because of the explorer.exe crashes and unsuccesful shutdowns. When the system is unbootable the startup repair from Vista DVD doesn't help, also all restore points are gone. Sometimes chkdsk has found corrupt files, also sfc /scannow has found problems, but after fixing them the computer might not even boot. The last time the computer wouldn't boot my relative told me he was using Windows Movie Maker when a blue screen of death occured. The computer has a 750 w Nexus psu and a UPS, so power outages or insufficient power shouldn't be the problem. I haven't reinstalled now after the last time problems occured, I have restored PC Complete backup but I have the feeling I will have to reinstall any day now if the backup is somehow bad because of these problems. The things I suspect are somekind of incompatibilty between the WD Velociraptor and the motherboard (Asus P5Q) or Vista, X-fi card or drivers or then the user is doing something wrong. I haven't found a virus or other malware once. I have slightly overclocked the processor just to get rid of the "overclocking failed" errors I got with the P5Q (even when it wasn't overclocked!). Man, if building your own computer is this hard I'll only recommend ready packages from now on..

[jjhuopa]

If I were to venture a guess, you may be treating the wrong symptom. In my experience, drive corruption is caused by improperly shutting down the computer. During normal operation, your hard drive will get information faster than it can write it to the disks, so it puts it into its cache, which is a small bit of RAM in the hard drive. Like normal memory, when the drive loses power, anything that is in the RAM is immediately lost, so if Windows had some system critical file in the cache, that information would be lost which could corrupt the system. You mentioned that it doesn't always shut down properly; how often does this happen? Does anything precipitate it not shutting down right, like a Windows update?

The shutdown problem happened very often after installation of sp2, but I think that was solved with a firmware update for the WD MyBook Home Edition. It seems to have shutdown normally after that, maybe Vista could not shut it down with the old firmware (it is connected with eSata cable). Once the computer did not shutdown while installing a Windows update, my realtive had shut it down manually. Maybe these problems were caused because of the shutdown issues, and with the firmware thing solved (possibly) maybe one more reinstall will give a stable system?