Asus G74Sx - Originally BSOD/start up cycle and now CHKDSK/corruption

[nightlysentinel]

Hello everyone,

My G74Sx recently went through a BSOD/crash loop and although I never determined the underlying cause I did get it working (temporarily) again. I thought it could be my HDD or RAM going bad, but I'm not sure. I may have made things worse. Hope someone here can help me figure out what's going on!

G74Sx, Intel i7-2630QM @ 2.00GHz, Bios Version American Megatrends Inc. G74Sx.201, 4/27/2011, 12 GB RAM, running Win 7 x64-bit Home Premium

1. Since I bought the system in Sep 2011, it has never booted up from hibernation/sleep well. On startup, it was generally very slow and acted like I was doing too much. It was easier to restart and then it would be fine.

2. Earlier this month (3/6 or 3/7), I was watching a movie and it suddenly froze. The audio continued to play. And when I went to task manager to cancel, I could interact with explorer.exe without any issues. However, the movie image remained frozen in the background behind my taskbar. I shut down the computer correctly.

3. On subsequent start up, it failed to start and BSOD'd. It would go through an endless loop of the Windows logo, act like it was going to start, and then BSOD. It would not boot in Safe Mode. The only thing I could do was go to BIOS.

4. I couldn't find my repair/restore CD, so I ordered a generic Win 7 x64 bit one off Amazon. I was able to run this successfully. It successfully repaired the first time and everything passed (even though there was still 1 root cause). Even though it repaired, it would not boot. So I ran the repair two more times.

5. At the end of the 3rd repair, I went into BIOS and changed from ACTA to ICE. After that, the system booted. I will not pretend to know why this worked and only tried it on a whim after seeing it worked for someone else on a forum. Why would this make a difference? Did I mess something up even more using a generic repair disk and changing this?

6. The system has been fairly stable until a little over a week ago. It doesn't seem to be running at full capacity (still hangs a bit). Last week, it started CHKDSK when booted. It has continually done this, I'd say 75% of the time. The first few times it found nothing, the past few days it found corrections in the index. Yesterday, it mentioned something about "x KB" in bad sectors.

7. Today, there was no CHKDSK running but upon startup there were many subsequent crashes and warning windows. Upon running any program there is error about "x.exe" corrupt file or directory in ...\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows.

I couldn't even run the SF Diagnostic tool without this popping up. I can't .zip the results either (I did use WinRar). When I go to "Send to..." there are no options in the menu.

I also cannot successfully make a repair CD using my computer. I got an error code that said write failed and "0xC0AA301."


I'm at a loss here. Amazingly, it's still running and I'm typing this on here now. Not really concerned about my data since I use Carbonite and have since frozen the backup. I can't tell if this is software or my HDD dying. It's one 750 GB partitioned (how it came).


Thanks so much for your time and help.

Nightly

 

[carwiz]

The file system structure on the disk is corrupt and unusable.

Windows was unable to load the registry.
DETAIL - The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.
for C:\Users\Sentinel\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\\UsrClass.dat

There's a horrendous number of disk errors on your C: drive. I'm surprised Windows will even start. However, the disk corruption and read faults may have occurred because of bad memory. It would be hard to trust either a memory test or a disk test on your PC at this point. I would take the PC to a service center and have them remove the disk drive and test it independent of your PC. The same goes for the memory modules.

I assume you have 3x4GB memory modules. You might try removing the modules and re-seating them. If that's no help, you could remove the memory modules and run with just one at a time as a test. It the errors stop, swap it for another single module and run. Do this for all three modules--One at a time. If there's no errors, add back just one more module (8GB). If that runs, you could have a bad #3 memory slot.