RESOLVED: Halp! BSOD during boot up.

[Deozaan]

EDIT: This issue has been resolved.

I had a power outage today and when I restarted my PC it had a BSOD during the boot up process and then restarted itself. It restarts itself before I even have a chance to read a single thing on the BSOD.

It then defaults to repair my PC, but when I select that option it takes about 20 minutes to display a background image and my mouse cursor and then nothing else seems to happen.

I also tried booting from the Windows 7 installation disk and selecting "Repair" but when it brings up the dialog for me to select which Windows 7 Installation to repair it shows a little dialog saying "Searching for Windows 7 Installations" and it does that for a really long time until there's a graphical glitch and nothing responds, with the exception of me being able to move the mouse cursor around the screen (but clicking on stuff doesn't do anything).

I tried booting into a Parted Magic Live CD but it tells me it can't do anything to the disk and that I need to run chkdsk /f in Windows. But I can't get to the command prompt for Windows. I then tried Safe Mode with Command Prompt but it also BSODs during the boot up process.

Now I'm in an Ubuntu Live CD and I ran Disk Utility and did the "Check Filesystem" option for this drive and it instantly tells me that the filesystem is clean and all is good. But if I try to mount the volume it also tells me there's a problem with the NTFS filesystem and I need to run chkdsk /f from Windows. Here's the exact message:

Error mounting: mount exited with exit code 13: ntfs_attr_pread_i: ntfs_pread failed: Input/output error
Failed to read NTFS $Bitmap: Input/output error
NTFS is either inconsistent, or there is a hardware fault, or it's a
SoftRAID/FakeRAID hardware. In the first case run chkdsk /f on Windows
then reboot into Windows twice. The usage of the /f parameter is very
important! If the device is a SoftRAID/FakeRAID then first activate
it and mount a different device under the /dev/mapper/ directory, (e.g.
/dev/mapper/nvidia_eahaabcc1). Please see the 'dmraid' documentation
for more details.

A few things of note: I'm not using it in a RAID. During the Windows 7 Repair thingy, when it lists the drive it says the partition size is 0 MB. I can't just pop it into another computer here for two reasons:

• This is the only PC that has (had?) Windows on it.
• This is a SATA drive and only this PC is compatible with SATA drives. I don't have a drive dock or (working) external enclosure.

The only tools I have to work with (software-wise) are Windows 7 boot CD, and Live CDs of Parted Magic or Ubuntu (10.04 and 10.10).

Any suggestions on how I can get this fixed with what I have?

[Carol Haynes]

Sounds like the partition table has become corrupted. Have you tried starting in safe mode and running chkdsk - if the table is badly damaged it probably won't work but it is obviously seeing at least the windows 7 boot partition if you can get to the repair tools.

I had a tool for fixing such issues for XP setups but it doesn't work for Windows 7 partitions for some reason.

You could try looking through http://www.ntfs.com/...ecovery-concepts.htm for some help on how to repair the table.

Basically I think you need something to scan the disk and recover the partition table and then do a full "chkdsk /r" from safe mode.

[mouser]

Ok so it sounds like the problem is with your hard drive, not with any other hardware on the pc.

My personal approach to hard drive problems is very straightforward:
1. Get any important data backed up from the pc first.
2. If possible, image the drive -- even if this means removing the hd, attaching it to another pc in an external dock.
3. Don't bother with trying to run any "repair" procedures -- reformat from scratch and treat the drive as suspicious for the next month.  If you can afford to, buy a new drive and use this one as an untrustworthy external backup/temp drive.

[Carol Haynes]

Mouser I agree with points 1 and 2 if possible but not necessarily 3. If the power outage damaged only the partition table the disk may well be recoverable in its entirety (I have don't this before on systems and they worked fine afterwards).

Having said that if you can extract the data (though that isn't necessarily easy if the partition cannot be read - esp. if any files are encrypted) it may be quicker to do a format and reinstall!

[Deozaan]

Thanks for responding. 

Basically I think you need something to scan the disk and recover the partition table and then do a full "chkdsk /r" from safe mode.

-Carol Haynes (June 29, 2011, 04:48 AM)

I can't boot to safe mode. It also BSODs when I try to boot into Safe Mode.

My personal approach to hard drive problems is very straightforward:
1. Get any important data backed up from the pc first.
2. If possible, image the drive -- even if this means removing the hd, attaching it to another pc in an external dock.

-mouser (June 29, 2011, 04:49 AM)

I can't seem to do #1 because I can't mount the drive in Linux due to the corrupt NTFS table (or whatever is wrong with it). And I can't do #2 because I can't attach it to another PC (my other PC is not compatible with SATA) and I don't have a dock/enclosure.

[Carol Haynes]

Have a look at:

http://www.partition...ery.com/download.htm

you could try the demo boot CDROM from that page which should at least be able to tell you if the disk is recoverable:

http://download2.lso....net/boot-cd-iso.zip

I haven't tried this software - and if you need to buy it it isn't cheap (at $80) but at least the demo may give you a clue what is going on.

[Deozaan]

Thanks. I hope my CD burner works from within this Ubuntu Live CD.

[Deozaan]

Well the CD burner might have worked, but I had to remove the Ubuntu Live CD to put in a blank CD, and that messed everything up. So then I tried rebooting back into the Live CD and for some reason it wouldn't do it.

Then I remembered I had a spare drive sitting around so I swapped out the bad drive with the spare and installed Windows on it. Once Windows was reinstalled, I attempted to plug in the old bad drive to try to chkdsk or whatever but my PC wouldn't boot when that drive was plugged in. In fact, after I decided it was toast and unplugged it, I even had to repair the good drive's boot stuff.

So I guess that drive is toast. I'm back up with Windows on the spare drive, I lost a little bit of data that was stored in my User directory (AppData). Most of that isn't important but I would have liked to have kept some of it (my Minecraft saves, for instance).

So anyway, thanks for the help. I guess I've got it sorted as well as it's going to be sorted now.

[Carol Haynes]

Moral - buy a decent UPS to stop it happening again!