Windows 7 no longer boots properly... sign of bad drive?

[PTT]

Hi, I've been happily using Win7 on a new Caviar Black drive for about a year, until yesterday when Win7 booted into the "System Recovery Options" screen rather than booting normally.

I proceeded to do a chkdsk on the drive, and while it says there are 0KB in bad sectors, it did say it fixed some issues with the file system (however it still won't boot properly -- I'll probably have to do a repair install)

My question is, should I be worried about this? Is this a sign of a bad drive even though apparently there are no bad sectors according to chkdsk? I don't recall making any changes to my system that might cause this prior to this happening, and also, the computer shut down cleanly just before this happened.

 

[Lanyap]

Did you use chkdsk with the /r option? If not, try it and chkdsk will scan for bad sectors and attempt to recover data if found.

You can also try the boot repair optoin in Win 7 when you press F8 during bootup.

After all of this you should run WD diags to confirm for sure if your drive is going bad.

If all of the above runs good then something else corrupted your Win 7 install. Do a full scan using Malwarebytes to make sure a virus did not corrupt it.

 

[PTT]

Yes, I did chkdsk with the /R option, still no bad sectors found.

I will try the boot repair option and see if that does anything, as well as the WD tool like you suggested, thanks. Just hope it's not a bad drive.

 

[Puppies04]

Have you tried plugging into another SATA port to rule out a faulty connection on the MOBO?

 

[Ketchup]

I have had checkdisk botch a Windows installation or 2 (had to restore a backup copy of the registry to fix it). I now have Seatools for DOS on a bootable CD and check the drive that way. I have never had an issue with that option.