Glad that it's my secondary PC downstairs and not my main system. Anyways, It's running windows XP pro. It was running fine before the driver update. I noticed the nvidia video driver was outdated to hell, so I downloaded the newest driver and installed it no problem. This is when all sorts of shit started going wrong. After installing the driver and restarting the PC, I got a Windows notification in the task bar telling me some files were corrupt. I was like OK, great! I ran chkdsk in Windows and had it enable a boot scan. So I restarted the computer so chkdsk can do it's thing. Chkdsk starts and just gives me an error message "cannot open volume for direct access". So it can't scan the hard drive and loads into Windows. Once in Windows I keep getting notifications that certain files/folders are corrupt. I'm thinking Ok, the HD is fucked. So I download Western Digital diagnostic tool and it passes all tests no problem. The fuck? Then I go to check the properties of the HD and it shows up as a SCSI drive! The fuck? It's a regular SATA drive. I'm thinking it must be the chipset drivers that are corrupt, since the chipset driver bundle installs storage drivers. I uninstall the chipset drivers and reinstall with the newest version. The HD still shows up as SCSI, and so is the DVD drive for that matter. Checked the bios settings and it's set to SATA. I don't know if the HD is fucking up and Western Digital diagnostic program is not detecting the problem, or is Windows corrupt really bad. How the fuck can a simple video driver update go so wrong =\ Things I have already tried: scanned for viruses uninstall/reinstall video driver along with chipset drivers checked bios settings scanned the HD for errors (chkdsk could not scan. Western Digital utility scanned it without any problems)
Boot to another OS on a USB drive, see what the hard drive looks like there. If you can get into Windows at all, try a System Restore to before you messed with the drivers.
Yea i can get into Windows no problem. It seems like when I right click on any icon on desktop and click on properties, this will cause a notification to pop up telling me a file is corrupt (usually Prefetch folder and sometimes other folders in the windows directory). I tried the system restore and I get a message "System restore is unable to protect your computer. Please restart your computer and run system restore again" I booted off Winternals CD and still can't use system restore from the CD.
Have you tried running chkdsk from a command prompt? If not I believe you can get a command prompt from the repair menu. Then try "chkdsk c: /r" without the quotes. If it does work it may take forever.
Yea I ran chkdsk from cmd and it found a bunch of corrupt files, but could not repair as it gave me a message something about "cannot continue in read-only mode" So it's weird that chkdsk finds corrupt files, yet Western Digital utility tells me the HD passes all tests. I ran another utility called Ariolic Disk Scanner and it too found no bad sectors or corrupt files.
Oh do you mean you were at desktop and went into command prompt? I've seen that error before when it was run while the OS was booted up. If so, I'd try doing it using the restore cd/dvd/partition. You could also try doing a "chkdsk /f" from the command prompt inside windows, it'll say something about not being able to do it and ask if you want to do it on reboot, so yes to that and then restart. Like I said this is only if you were doing it from inside your OS originally. Hope this helps.
yea when i have chkdsk do a scan at boot, it gives me another error "cannot open volume for direct access" and it skips the scan and goes back into windows.
Oh damn. Looking around it seems like SpyDoctor can cause issues similar. Do you by any chance have that installed?
no spydoctor. I've ran all sorts of antiviruses including malwarebytes, superantispyware, hitman pro, and combofix. No infections found. i was thinking with these random corrupt files maybe it's the memory...i ran memtest and it passed 3 times with no errors. i think the HD is glitching somewhere somehow and probably corrupted the Windows.
just noticed that my DVD rom is no longer showing in MyComputer. Checked device manager and looks like the CDROM generic driver that Windows supplies is corrupt. Windows has gone to hell. Time to get a new hard drive and install a fresh copy of WinXP.
Yeah, it sounds like your HD is definitely failing. Unfortunate that it happened so fast. Hopefully you backup your files often. Good luck!
If you do get a new HD you could always try turning your old one into a slave drive. That way if you can't backup your files now you may at least be able to access them that way. Sucks about your HD though
Good luck getting a copy of XP. Haven't they stopped making them? And copies go for a ridiculous amount now because it was such an awesome OS
Start at the source, you updated the video driver. Roll back to the previous one. You may have installed one for a different OS then the one you're running..
The video driver was for the right OS. Don't think it's possible to install a driver for a different OS. And as I explained in my first post, I did uninstall and reinstall the video driver. The problem is the hard drive. It's corrupting random files making windows unstable. I already bought a new HD and installed XP on it. Put the bad HD as a secondary, and now just gotta transfer all my files and reinstall a whole bunch of shit.