Windows 7 repair shows 0mb partition size

[birdzz]

I put a computer together a week ago and the first time I installed windows 7 and then installed the graphics/motherboard drivers it did not boot back up. It would say that windows failed to start (it wouldn't give me a reason) and then would go into attempt start-up repairs. I let this run a few times and this did not fix the problem. In the start-up repair screen (run from the CD) it has me select a windows installation but the only one listed is a Windows 7 installation with a partition size of 0 mb. I figured it was a driver issue so I reinstalled windows 7 and this time used drivers I downloaded from ASRock's website and only installed the LAN and graphics drivers and left everything else stock. When I went to reinstall windows the partitions showed up correctly at 260gb and 11gb. This appeared to work for about a week when suddenly the computer froze up, we restarted it, and then windows wouldn't boot up again and start-up repair came up. I reinstalled windows 7 again last night and did the same thing again although this time I let windows update run all night. When I work up this morning it was back to the same problem again.

Any suggestions for how I should start to investigate this would be very much appreciated!

Specs follow:
ASRock H61M/U3S3 LGA 1155 Intel H61 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard
CORSAIR 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 Desktop Memory Model CMV8GX3M2A1333C9 PNY Commercial Series VCGGT5201XPB-CG GeForce GT 520 (Fermi) 1GB 64-bit DDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready Low Profile Video Card
Seagate Momentus 7200.4 ST250LT021 250GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Notebook Hard Drive -Bare Drive
COOLER MASTER Elite 460 RS-460-PSAR-I3 460W ATX12V V2.31 Power Supply
Intel Pentium G870 Sandy Bridge 3.1GHz LGA 1155 65W Dual-Core Desktop Processor Intel HD Graphics BX80623G870

 

[bobafetthotmail]

I'd check the HDD to see if it's faulty, download the disk check utility from the manufacturer's site (since you have all the specs it should be easy to find) and run it on that HDD from another PC.

Not a guarantee to find the culprit, but that's where I would start investigating given the kind of error and what you did already.

 

[skanigins]

I would say the option is intead of doing system repair open cammnd promt and enter follwoing commands to check your hard drive for any errors etc. - chkdsk X: /f /r (Where X is your drive letter - more likely to be D: in Windows PE Environment)

Hope this helps

 

[gregrocker]

Once you've tested the HD and RAM as provided above and in Troubleshooting Steps for Windows 7, then if they are clean I'd follow the same steps to get a perfect Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7.

In particular only use the drivers delivered by installer and then immediately running all rounds of Important and Optional Windows Updates after enabling Automatically get recommended drivers and updates for your hardware (Step 3).

However this time boot the installer into the System Recovery Options Command Line to run Diskpart Clean Command to clear the boot sector of all code which can interfere.