Anybody experienced this system crash?

Miscellaneous Topics
#1

Hello,

Recently I’ve came back from vacation and turned on my pc. Every thing went slow, it’s extremely slow. I’ve not used my pc in the last 20 days. The only thing I’ve did after coming back is installing Windows 8.1 Update 1 from the control panel. It asked me for a restart and after that, my computer didn’t turn on. I’ve thought it may be some thing to do with hard disk, but I can access Mavericks and Ubuntu just fine, it’s only the windows that didn’t work.

I’ve opened windows in safe mode and ran the chkdsk utility. To my surprise, there are no problems on the disk. I had to force close any programs using the task manager. There I noticed that the disk usage was 100% and there are no programs except the Command Prompt open. I closed it too and still the disk usage was 100%, I then opened Resource Monitor to find that it was svchost.exe running under system and in brackets, there is “Superfetch”. I went into services and disabled superfetch and suddenly the disk usage dropped to 4-8%. Then I did a small searching and found that Superfetch is a service that enhances the speed of the harddisk data transfer rate. It ran well for two days, then another problem started.

Whenever I opened MS Word, the system got a BSOD and restarted automatically. I thought it maybe due to some spyware or malware and did thorough scans with McAfee, AVG, Avast and also Windows Defender. Still no luck. I installed MS Office again and again the same problem occurred. I thought I should restart and reinstall, but after rebooting, again it was terribly slow, I had waited for 12 minutes to get to the start screen. Then I rebooted into safe mode and from CMD, I ran some commands which I’ve found on the internet searches, I don’t even know what are they, but later it messed with my custom bootloader and even mavericks and ubuntu can’t boot now. Those commands formatted the boot partition I was using for hackintosh.

The only thing left for me is to completely reformat my PC. I also inspected my harddrive with the DiskUtility tool and it said it is in full health. I’m currently posting this while booting in the live cd of ubuntu, taking backups.

Does anybody got this problem before? If so are there any other steps I can take to rescue my system?

Thanks in advance.

#2

If you set up partitioning correctly, you can reinstall without losing your user files. (That said, backups are still a good idea)

On Linux, it’s as simple as mounting a separate partition at /home.
On Windows, store your user files on a different drive. (which I’m not entirely sure how to setup. Basically add a new drive location for the extra partition)
On Mac, IDK, but it’s probably similar to the way for Linux.

It’s not exactly useful for rescuing your system now, but it may make things easier in case it happens again.

You may be able to save your current setup (well, probably not the Windows install) by just reinstalling the bootloader.

#3

Thanks for your reply. I always keep my data in a separate partition called “DATA”. Didn’t get what you meant by mounting at /home. Ubuntu mounts them at /media right?

#4

I’ve had issues with svchost chewing up disk on some of my family’s computers, I hate that.

If you can get a picture of the BSOD, then I might be able to help, but without knowing what happened I can’t really. :-\

#5

I’m unable get a screenshot. It just becomes blue with a message “We are unable to get to Windows. We need to restart windows” or something like that.

#6

Take a photo.

#7

I had tried to reinstall windows 7. At 74%, it says “unable to find installation files”. Any ideas? That is the only windows install disk I had and now it fails.

#8

Microsoft offers Windows ISO downloads for free on their website.

#9

I’ve downloaded windows 7 ultimate iso and created usb. Everytime after install, windows failed to boot with this error.

I’ve tried to install almost seven times and still the same result. I could boot into the command prompt and ran chkdsk utility and its showing errors.

Is this a problem in the hard disk? Is there any way to find and repair my hard disk from ubuntu?

#10

This is starting to sound like a hardware problem, especially if installing a fresh copy of Windows fails.

For next time, remember this useful tool when having weird issues with Windows: ‘sfc /scannow’, this scans the integrity of core Windows files and attempts to fix them.

#11

Yeah, that doesn’t look good from any perspective. I’ve dealt with saving partitions when my Linux kernel went corrupt from Windows, but I never tried it from reverse. You may be able to try using this link… it used a similar path that I tried when going from Win to Linux partition fixes…

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/linux-data-recovery.html

Windows not loading period is a problem. You might want to consider wiping out the entire partition, or at the very least, seeing if you can get the important files out of that partition by making it accessible from Linux. I have a huge list of links somewhere deep in my file system pertaining to this, but I’ll wait for further info before digging any deeper.

#12

Finally, I’ve found the problem. It is that a corrupt partition table or I had both GPT and MBR tables which do not sync together. I fixed the problem with the [icode]gptsync[/icode] command. Thanks for your time everyone.