GT725 Won't boot up, hangs on crcdisk.sys

Hi gents

I've owned my GT725 (UK) for about a month, and have been generally pleased with it. Up until today, the only issue was its habit of freezing whenever it had been left idle for 25 minutes, forcing me to do a hard restart. I disabled all the power-saving options (including the hard disc auto-sleep) but this problem persisted.

However, things got a million times worse this morning. As I was shutting down last night, I noticed the laptop was sluggish to respond, forcing me to click "shut down" twice before the process started. This morning, the laptop would not get past the booting screen at all. It just gets stuck on the moving green line. I can't boot into safe mode either; it hangs on "crcdisk.sys" whichever option I choose.

I'm also unable to start the Vista repair option. When I select it, the screen goes black for five seconds and then returns me to the same choice screen. The MSI recovery disks only give me the option of reformatting, which I'm loath to do if I can find a fix for this. I did some googling, and apparently crcdisk.sys isn't the problem file; it's the file after which is causing the issue, which is great, but doesn't help me at all.

I'd be grateful for any advice about solving the problem. It's a good laptop and I don't want to RMA it if I can help it. My settings are largely unaltered, except for the 9.2 Catalyst drivers.

 

I have had this problem quite a few times with 4-5 different laptops and think its time MS did something about it. One thing that has helped me is to do a disk check in vista. The only way I could do this is pull out the hard drive throw it into an external enclosure and do a disk check with another computer. It doesn't always solve the problem, but it has for 2-3 of them.

 

Thanks for the tip. It's good to know I'm not the only one having this problem. Any guesses about what's causing it?

For testing, do you think it's safe to connect the HD without using an enclosure, or is it a must? Also, will it invalidate the warranty if I do this?

Cheers

 

Ive heard people say they've had this, all they did to fix was reseat the HD (wouldnt advise if under warrenty) Could try a reinstall of windows?

 

http://social.technet.microsoft.com.../thread/c129950e-dd8c-4191-a71a-ae52c58eee07/

 

I managed to get the laptop to boot by choosing "directory services restore" from the list of startup options. This ran chkdsk automatically. Errors were detected and corrected, and the laptop started up ok. However, it would still hang if left idle for more than 20 minutes.

Today, I plugged my new ESATA HD in and did some recording on Cubase. After shutting down normally, the laptop once again would not get past the loading screen, except for once, when it did a lightning-fast BSOD and then restarted. I had to run chkdsk again. The laptop booted, ran ok for a couple of minutes, and then hung in the same way as when it's left idle: the cursor turns to the blue "loading" circle, and no buttons will do anything.

It's clear that something is very wrong with this laptop, and has been ever since I bought it, since the freeze-on-idle problem manifested itself on first boot, and after a complete reformat. I don't have a vanilla Vista disc, just the system restore disc that came with the computer, so I don't have many options.

I ran a memory check, which revealed no errors. Could this be an issue with the 5400 RPM hard disc, I wonder?

update: the instances of freezing and BSODs are definitely much higher when the ESATA HD is plugged in. I'm guessing this is some kind of issue with the hard disc controller, but more than that, I have no idea.