My computer keeps freezing

molnarski · #1 October 14th, 2009, 04:07 PM

Hi I am running Vista Home Premium 64
At least 3 times a week my computer freezes and I am forced to power it down (CTRL ALT DEL does nothing)
I then have to use my restore disk and do a start up repair and get the same message every time (The partition table does not have a valid system partition) the repair tool say it has fixed the problem and yes my computer will now boot up and work for a day or maybe 2 but then it freezes agian and I have to go through the repair process again and agian
I am hoping someone might have some suggestions about what I can do to stop this.

Thanks very much...

Terry60 · #2 October 14th, 2009, 07:40 PM

Hi Molnarski, welcome to NST.
It sounds like there might be some bad blocks in the HDD boot sector.
Try running chkdsk /f or /r against your OS partition to remove them from continued reuse.

molnarski · #3 October 15th, 2009, 04:32 PM

Hi Terry
Thanks for the reply I ran chkdsk/f and it found no problems.
Not being much of a computer guy I am not sure what to try next.

Thanks again
George

Mark Phelps · #4 October 15th, 2009, 05:19 PM

It's a long shot, I know, but I ran into nearly the same problems when I mistakenly allowed Windows Update to "update" my motherboard SATA controller driver. After that, I started having random crashes and repeated file system corruption problems. I had to do a driver rollback and use third-party data recovery SW to get my files back.

I noticed that on my home machine, this week, I was offered another SATA controller driver update -- which I wisely refused.

Don't know what machine you have, but if it's fairly recent, it's a good bet it's using a SATA controller, so you can look in Device Manager to see if there's any history of controller driver updates.

molnarski · #5 October 17th, 2009, 01:14 AM

Hi Mark
Thanks for the idea, so far I have not been able to look at drivers becasue now the computer will boot up but whenever I try to open any application the computer freezes then the screen goes black the mouse start working again but everything is black and all i can do is power down and try again but no luck

molnarski · #6 October 17th, 2009, 08:10 PM

Does any one know if upgrading to Windows 7 is suppposed tro fix problems like this. I can't use my computer and am at the point where I think I might have to reload the OS but am wondering if I should wait a few days and make the leap to 7
Thanks for any help!

kairozamorro · #7 October 18th, 2009, 01:05 AM

Yeah a re-install is best. Start up in safe mode using F8 at boot up and backup your important files. If you plan to upgrade the machine and can wait a week I would wait til you get your Windows 7 media (clean installs are better than upgrades).

molnarski · #8 October 24th, 2009, 12:47 AM

So I did a clean install of Vista and then up-graded to 7 my computer is working now but I have done a clean install of Vista once before and after about 3 weeks it started acting crazy again so I will keep my fingers crossed and let you know how it goes.
Thanks for your help!

molnarski · #9 November 2nd, 2009, 10:42 PM

So after about a day and a half the same problems started re-appearing so i took the computer in for repair (under warrnaty thankfuly) and they are putting in a new motherboard. I'll let you know how tht goes!