I think bluetooth drivers destroyed my computer

So... no laptop right now my entire windows install has been corrupted or deleted in some way and I think it was the bluetooth drivers that did it...

Sharing just in case somebody knows the cause or fix or just looking for some entertainment value in reading about my misfortune.

My G73 is rock solid stable, never any issues or crashes. I was running a fairly new windows install with pretty much just the basics. No bloat or extras.

The only new things on the computer in the last month are just some steam games, and my Razer Orochi software.

Tonight I got on to play Magicka and my mouse goes comatose on me a few times, my mouse seems to do this at random when in bluetooth mode. I had been planning to get around to testing with a BT dongle to determine if its my laptop hardware or the mouse hardware. Never had any issues with other BT devices so I think it may be the mouse, however using the MotionInJoy drivers for a PS3 controller over writes the stock bluetooth drivers and you can not even connect other devices with these installed.

As a fix I downloaded Asus's BT drivers from the global site. Installed them and was able to use my mouse in BT mode.

Here passes a month and tonight I decide to install them again just in case something is messed up like some other drivers took priority.

Im watching a hour long Day9 video on youtube in firefox since Magicka just crashed to desktop on me twice when fighting the Level 6 boss and I was frustrated with that game.

The BT driver installer fails, it says it cant locate a file and then rolls back to the older drivers. Thinking it odd I run it again and it hangs for a long long time.

I had run and installed these same drivers more than once so I have no idea what is wrong.

At some point watching day 9 I tab to the desktop to cancel the installer and see everything on my desktop is gone except the folder for the BT drivers. Also my quick launch icons for firefox & photoshop have had the icons change to white boxes. I click on them and it says the file can not be found and deletes the shortcut.

I click on the windows start button and every program/folder on the list is missing.

Thinking its just a bug and I need to restart. I restart the computer and get a boot error.

Says it can not initiate the boot device or find the bootloader something like that.

I thought it was the HDD failing at first but I can still see the HDD in the bios and even boot to the recovery partition. I cant however try to repair the install via recovery only start anew so I have to wait till I have time to find a Win 7 disk and try to repair it.

I'll let you guys know what I find. For the most part I can lose what is on there except some very important video project files because I am working on a video for a company and getting paid for it and I have all my work saved there in a folder as well as my source material.

I will probably take the HDD out and try to extract that data before I even attempt a recovery. This will also be a good indicator of if the HDD failed or not.

So stay tuned for the details on what the heck happened.

Also there was a windows update running in the background I remember that too, sometimes I swear these auto updates break stuff.

 

Maybe a bad system restore point caused that?

Anyway good luck with the startup repair, hopefully the windows 7 disc does the trick.

 

If it turns out its related to the hard drive my suggestion is to use Hiren's BootCD tools to isolate and repair the bad sectors

I had a 500GB Seagate that failed to boot and I was able to salvage the files by installing the drive as a second drive in my desktop

 

Im starting to think more of it being a drive failure, being how the BT installer I have run before had an error finding a file, and then it just went from there.

Though its strange for so much of the drive to fail with no warning and still having the recovery partition and stuff working as well as hearing the drive spool up and seeing it in bios.

No SMART failures that I can see assuming it shows them to you @ boot like my desktop did when it had a drive going out.

Im just going to handle it in order of least destructive to most destructive

First use it as an external drive on another computer to see if the files are there and the drive is working.
If so, copy what I need.

Next is windows dvd, try a startup repair.

After that is when I will get into the boot tools and start trying to do sector recovery and other advanced things.

I have a image of the drive I created after I got my basic programs and all my drivers installed so if I have to get a new drive or restore this one from scratch that will save me quite a bit of time. I'll still have a few drivers to update, and have to install a few programs and games and of course lose my data I had but its a lot better than a total fresh install.

 

I was not even able to read the drive in the desktop at first , until I ran the repair bad sectors utility as the message this drive needs to be formatted message came up when I attempted to read it!

I ran HD tune and 60 or so bad sectors were reported under smart

To check on warranty I had to download the manufacturers utility ,in this case it was a Seagate and I ran seatools

The report came out that it was not bad enough for warranty as it needed 100 bad sectors! Heath reported at 40% or so

It's sitting in the corner now , I replaced the drive , and someday I will toss it in the garbage

 

Tomcat I use UBCD (ultimate boot cd) just got it up and going on my flash drive.
Do you remember the HDD utility you used to fix your bad sectors?

 

I think this was it:

I think even a chkdsk /r would do, but it may not be the best way.

 

well here is a summary so far.

Using Seagates tools built into UBCD both HDD's passed the short test fine.

I then went and use Windows 7 disk to startup repair.

It found my windows install, but could not fix the problem. This is normal I almost always have to do it manually.

So from repair command prompt ran

Bootrec.exe /FixMbr
Bootrec.exe /FixBoot
Bootrec.exe /RebuildBcd

First 2 said success, last one failed said missing element...

The error still there at startup "can not initilize device" I'll get the exact error and code next time I see it. Running the long test now from seagate tools and that takes a long time.

I also tried to flip the hard drives around in bios to see if they got messed up but it then just booted directly to CD or USB so I know it was fine, have to change it back.

What ever it is, seems like I cant fix the boot/windows install but yet so far disk checks have passed fine and windows repair see's the install just fine.

 

Update: both of the drives fine.

Have passed every test with flying colors.

Still no luck repairing the boot, went ahead and pulled the drive out to read the files.

What I saw in windows before that shut down is really what is here...

Nothing on my desktop every file/folder is gone except my BT Drivers folder.

Other strange things like say my steam games folder that should have about 10 games only has Super Meat Boy there.

Drive Space 443GB Free of 446GB so basically everything is gone, the only stuff not gone is probably the few files somehow in use when this "in windows format" happened. There is not even a recycle bin... so I hope the data is still there via recovery program.

My Documents Folder - Totally empty

Its like all my data was randomly deleted while in use its crazy.

So now it comes down to, what is the best deleted file recovery program, as it looks like that is what I must do, recovery my important data if possible then install windows or restore my acronis image.


Using These: http://lifehacker.com/393084/how-to-recover-deleted-files-with-free-software

Like Recuva probably the most since it lets me select multile files easy while the other one had me clicking one by one. All my files seem to be here BTW

 

Don't think anything got deleted just a bad hdd crash and partition table got totally corrupted.
Don't know if I would trust sensitive data to that hdd again.

Next time find out the hardware vendor and get the drivers from there.
I never downloaded anything else then bios from manufacturer websites.

 

Im all fixed up. I confimred the data was gone when I booted with a linux live cd and it was gone, and again when I removed the drive and used it as an external drve on a computer.

The drive read like 447GB free of 448GB the only files on the drive looks like the ones that were loaded and in use during the actual crazy event.

So mostly some windows files, some program files, and that one folder on my desktop.

I was able to get back all the stuff in my documents and on my desktop with Recuva, a good un-delete program.

I was then able to restore my computer to a backup I did 2 months ago with Acronis.

In the end I should not have lost too much.

Acronis was a pain, the version I had backup media for was older than the version I did the backup with so it wouldnt recover, and it would not read the 2nd hdd in the laptop so I had to take it out and recover with it as an external drive.

 

Joined these forums just to share what happened to me along these same lines.


Dell Latitude E4200 only 4 months old running Windows 7 Pro

Bluetooth stopped working so decided to re-install/update drivers. Downloaded latest from Dell website using machines service tag and for appropriate OS and the installation was taking several hours and never did finish, appeared to get stuck. Canceled installation and restarted machine. After restarting installation this time is was doing an uninstallation instead. Figured would let it finish then re-run again to actually install.

However during the uninstallation icons started disappearing from the desktop, windows explorer and internet explorer links did not work. This threw up a red flag so I killed the uninstallation but it was too late.

System Restore within windows at that point failed. Upon which i restarted the system. System no longer boots up not even to safe mode.

* Startup recovery for windows 7 failed.
* System restore within startup recovery (advanced options failed).

Used CD boot up Ubuntu 9.10 with NTFS file recovery program to "undelete" the user data that I could to an external hard drive. Avoiding any writing to the internal hard drive to allow for the best possible chances of data recovery. Unfortunately alot of the data recovered was corrupt though I was able to recovery some user data using this method.

Dell Wireless 365 Bluetooth Module
Release Date: 1/22/2010
Version: 6.2.1.100, A04-2
Download Type: Application
File Format: Hard Drive
File Size: 61 MB

I have notified Dell but they do not appear to have this issue in their knowledge base and the repair is left to me. Yay! So remember to get a FULL SYSTEM IMAGE before you attempt to update your bluetooth drivers LOL!!

 

Crazy! But thanks for joining to let us know you had the same issue.

Now I atleast know this is not an isolated incident.