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Windows 7 blue screen crash/hard drive booting issue/NTLDR missing
Hey all,
Came across a problem recently on my 9 month old rig.
Specs are in my profile.
Anyway, I had 3 hard drives set up: my main SSD which runs Windows 7, a USB external 1 terabyte and a 500gig SATA Western Digital. I believe the 500gig SATA was failing or malfunctioning. I was getting error messages that the drive was bad a while back, but never got around to fixing or removing it because I was lazy and it still worked (read/write). I kept some junk media and files on it but other than that didn't touch it. Well my rig started acting funny a few days ago, I thought it might have been a worm or malware. I ran my usual combination of programs and security. I like to keep my system pretty clean. I did find a few threats but took care of them. I hadn't ran them for a bit, so I thought nothing unusual. Well, my PC started crashing randomly and giving me issues until 1 time I noticed my 500gig SATA was corrupt or something. All the data on it was gone and it was reading 200gig instead of 500gig. I was still able to read/write to it though. Still kept having the crashes and freezing.
I removed the SATA, wiped the SSD and re-installed a fresh copy of Windows 7. Everything went without a hitch. Windows runs fine, everything went normal. Computer is running beautiful, but I am still having a crashing issue. It happens randomly. Happened twice when watching movies off my external and twice now while just browsing the web. The system will freeze forcing me to manually restart or it will freeze and a blue screen will pop up saying the system crashed and it's dumping memory yada yada and force me to manually restart. If I leave it to restart on it's own, it will boot and I get a variety of boot error messages. NTLDR is missing, press CTRL ALT DEL to restart or some other boot message. Once I manually restart, Windows will start up normally, but has recognized it shut down improperly.
I read it might have something to do with my boot order or the external, so I removed that off the boot order list and made sure my SSD was my main hard drive and boots first. I checked my system and CPU temps, everything seems normal. I am not sure what it could be. I have a fully clean install. The only thing rolling over is all my media files on my external. But could my external really cause the system to crash like that? I have no idea what it is and it seems Windows will run fine for a determined amount of time. A few hours or more until it happens randomly. Doesn't seem to be a pattern. I also read NTLDR is only associated with Win XP and BOOTMGR is for Win 7 so I don't know what is going on there. I am going to take apart my machine later and check all the cables and everything, but this is a pretty new machine with no previous problems. I keep it clean, but it's not to say I don't get malware/viruses. But if it was that, you would think the format would take care of it. And if it was my corrupt SATA causing it through the boot manager/order, that would be solved by removing it. So far, it's been 2 hours and Windows is running fine. Anyone have a scrap of an idea or had this problem before? I know it's a bit vague and could be many things, but I think it has something to do with my hard drives or it's a virus/worm (but I don't see how). Thanks.
UPDATE: Windows freezes around every hour or so forcing me to manually restart. If I leave it frozen, it will restart itself after a while giving me the "NLTRD is missing" error.
Last edited by altek; 15 Sep 2012 at 09:58.