Gaming... Lockup... Restart... No valid system partition. Twice now.

This has now happened to me twice in the last four months. Both times, I was in the middle of playing a different resource-intensive game. I exceed the minimum requirements for both and play with reasonable settings to limit wear-n-tear and get better performance.

During play, with no discernible transition or cause, the machine became non-responsive to Ctrl+Alt+Del. (and the numlock key failed to toggle its light.) The chassis restart button brought me to a black screen which said no bootable media was found. Windows installation did not detect a valid windows partition; fortunately Windows Partition Table Repair program "fixed" the lack thereof. Twice now...

Fun side note: I often experience game lockups in any demanding game which I can Ctrl+Alt+Delete out of; a good quarter of my gaming sessions end this way.

Now I'm very paranoid about the cause. Is there a safe way to determine what might be responsible? Apparently no minidump / kernel dump was created, leaving me blind to the possible cause. Running 7 SP1 and all my drivers are non-beta and up-to-date.

What I really want to know is: Why would any such crash corrupt the partition table? Is it possible I'm pushing the machine too hard? Also, am I going to be able to fix this issue the same way each time it occurs?

My sincere thanks for any insight,

Many possibilities to be had and not knowing your system specs and/or what game is causing the problem, it will be hard to lend a hand.

If you can go to the UserCP and fillout the "My System Specs" it would help us help you. Also, which game is the one giving you the error?

Thanks for the response; I've edited my specs as of this posting.

The first time this occurred, I believe I was playing Alien:Isolation (nothing scarier than failure to start up!).

Most recently, it occurred while playing Far Cry 4.

Today I encountered a BSOD while web-surfing; this time kernel_data_inpage_error was announced as the cause. (Restarted fine, no damaged partition table).

Given these disk-related errors, I'm strongly inclined to think I've got a "dying" SDD. Is there any reason I should believe otherwise? Planning a purchase ASAP.

OK, first of all, I despise UBI so I am a little bias towards them but for very good reason... the first one being the badly coded and unfinished console ports they make and have the balls to call them PC games.

I read somewhere, and I am not saying this with 100% certainty, that SSDs were not good for gaming... and here your miles may vary as you will soon see.

FC4, like many UBI shooter/Action games are the worse pieces of crap to date... FC4 initially came with a very bad field of view, bugs, glitches, freezes, you name it. UBI calmed the masses saying it was on purpose to detract Pirates (boy they sure have an awesome PR dept because most lemmings ate it with two hands).

Every time they launch an update (or patch), they brake things that were working before and don't fix what they were supposed to fix... case in point, it is well known that if you don't save (backup) your saved games, when you update they may break or add more bugs to the already buggy game. My advise, if you only play FC4 for the Campaign, forget about playing it Online (do Off-Line only) and forget about updating to more than 1.4 or 1.5... you don't need it, my friend has finished the game twice with 1.5 (after a few tweaks here and there that I did for him by googling those fixes.)

Now, being said that, you mentioned that all of your drivers were up to date but, if you have updated the game recently and because it will not harm your computer, I would download fresh drivers of both your Audio and Video, uninstall the video drivers, then run the Nvidia Game Experience software (or whatever is called, I always forget) and remember to use/click the option that allows for a Clean Install. After you are done, go ahead and restart and let the drivers finish installing and try the game again.

On another note, I do have an SSD for my OS and two additional HDD and all of my games are installed in one of the HDDs, to date, no issues with most games. Of course, I don't have the latest and the greatest rig nor I want to show off or snoob people by showing that I can play the games full Maxed. I always use the options the game set (aside from a few that I know may cause damage and in FC4 there are a few) and perhaps I don't get to see the character's sweat but then again, the video quality is enough for me to enjoy the game.

I have strong misgivings about the game industry myself; however, given the nature of the issues I'm experiencing, the specific game is likely unrelated. Various issues occur across every game I play, including soft lockups, hard lockups, random crashes, BSODs, etc. The corrupt partition table issue is merely the scariest among these problems.

What I'd really like to learn here is how any crash could cause partition table corruption. My research into this question has yielded only results discussing workarounds; nothing about diagnosing the cause.

I bought an SSD solely for gaming (and the slight boost associated with everyday applications). It's branded "Crucial" which supposedly have a MTTF far greater than "six months" - yet I'm now reasonably convinced the SSD is to blame. All of my BSOD's to date on this system have been disk-related.

Bummer too; besides the cost of replacement and hassle of re-installing everything, digging into this mini-itx case is an absolute nightmare.

I have had so many headaches because of bad HDDs and a couple of SDDs that now, right when I am done installing the OS plus, the main Apps I will use and all of the updates, I make a clone of my OS Drive just in case I have issues later on. You still have the hassle and headache of installing the games and a few other apps that you installed after the fact but you don't have to go through it all from the get go.

My rig is giving me headaches and I am procrastinating re installing everything else I need because I heard that Microsoft will give away W10 to all W7 owners but this waiting is killing me

Hope you resolve your issue soon. My