So, about two weeks ago, my computer started to lock up randomly. I normally run Windows 7, it would manifest as one process locking up, sometimes for 10 seconds, sometimes for 30 seconds or a minute or two minutes, or sometimes for good. The window could be moved around, although it would usually leave... ghost windows, or something, in the path of the window.
This culminated in a complete system lockup, and when I restarted scandisk found a metric ton of corrupted files, but wasn't able to fix them. Windows was just dead.
My Linux partition (Ubuntu 9) seemed fine from what I could tell.
Figuring that something went south in Windows itself, I wiped that partition and re-installed.
No good. Still happened. And it could be really odd things locking up, too... The properties for the taskbar and Chrome seemed equally likely to freeze. Ended the same way as the last install, a massive system lockup, followed by unrecoverable hard drive corruption.
So, attempt to fix it #2, I collapsed all the partitions on the drive into one, re-partitioned the drive, and re-installed. Figured maybe somehow the partition itself got corrupted.
No luck. Exact same deal.
Well, through all this, Linux seemed to be fine... I put Ubuntu 10 on, and went about my merry way using that, in the short term. Then the same problem started to happen in Linux, too, a couple of days later. The lockups seemed better, Linux seemed to be much better at handling them and working past whatever the issue was, but they still happened. Then Linux died the same way my last 3 Windows installs had, and left the disk with a ton of unfix able file corruption. Linux couldn't even mount the drive.
Tried re-installing Linux... Installs fine, but has little brief lockups constantly, and won't survive the first reboot... Hangs trying to load the system, invariably, following a reboot.
...
Gut feeling is it's the Mobo. Haven't ruled out the HD itself, but it's fairly new. Of course, so is the mobo. (Abit AW9D-MAX i975... ok, not really that new, sadly)... Doubt it's the processor (e6600), the symptoms seem wrong. It's not the RAM insofar as I can tell, several memtests turn up clean. The only reason I doubt the HD itself being the problem is that when it works, it seems to work fine... Copying to and from the disk produce uncorrupted files, it isn't noisy, file transfer speeds to and from the drive are fine, etc.
I'm not in a financial position to just replace the machine... But I'm not sure what my best option for trying to replace components is either, I don't want to waste money on replacing good components, but I'm not sure of my own diagnosis.
Any thoughts or suggestions?
This culminated in a complete system lockup, and when I restarted scandisk found a metric ton of corrupted files, but wasn't able to fix them. Windows was just dead.
My Linux partition (Ubuntu 9) seemed fine from what I could tell.
Figuring that something went south in Windows itself, I wiped that partition and re-installed.
No good. Still happened. And it could be really odd things locking up, too... The properties for the taskbar and Chrome seemed equally likely to freeze. Ended the same way as the last install, a massive system lockup, followed by unrecoverable hard drive corruption.
So, attempt to fix it #2, I collapsed all the partitions on the drive into one, re-partitioned the drive, and re-installed. Figured maybe somehow the partition itself got corrupted.
No luck. Exact same deal.
Well, through all this, Linux seemed to be fine... I put Ubuntu 10 on, and went about my merry way using that, in the short term. Then the same problem started to happen in Linux, too, a couple of days later. The lockups seemed better, Linux seemed to be much better at handling them and working past whatever the issue was, but they still happened. Then Linux died the same way my last 3 Windows installs had, and left the disk with a ton of unfix able file corruption. Linux couldn't even mount the drive.
Tried re-installing Linux... Installs fine, but has little brief lockups constantly, and won't survive the first reboot... Hangs trying to load the system, invariably, following a reboot.
...
Gut feeling is it's the Mobo. Haven't ruled out the HD itself, but it's fairly new. Of course, so is the mobo. (Abit AW9D-MAX i975... ok, not really that new, sadly)... Doubt it's the processor (e6600), the symptoms seem wrong. It's not the RAM insofar as I can tell, several memtests turn up clean. The only reason I doubt the HD itself being the problem is that when it works, it seems to work fine... Copying to and from the disk produce uncorrupted files, it isn't noisy, file transfer speeds to and from the drive are fine, etc.
I'm not in a financial position to just replace the machine... But I'm not sure what my best option for trying to replace components is either, I don't want to waste money on replacing good components, but I'm not sure of my own diagnosis.
Any thoughts or suggestions?
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