Both of my hard drives have crashed - help!

(Pre-script: there's a TL;DR at the end, but please read the entire post if you can )

So I posted a thread a few weeks ago about my new SSD crashing (see http://forum.notebookreview.com/win...pair-windows-but-dont-have-optical-drive.html). To summarize the thread, I put in a new SSD and everything was working great for about a week; then I got a Blue Screen of Death (my first ever, I might add), the cause was a bad system config (according to W7), and I tried a bunch of solutions.

Ultimately, I decided to put my old hard drive back in for a few days and test it. The old drive actually did give me a BSOD at one point, but I rebooted and everything was OK. Interestingly, the BSOD I got with my old hard drive was different than the ones I had previously gotten with my SSD: the old hard drive's BSOD listed the problem as a secondary processing error (or something along those lines). After running the old drive for a few days successfully, I decided to update my drivers, BIOS, etc. and re-clone it.

This worked for about 3 days before my SSD BSODed on me again. It was a different error this time, too. On my new SSD, I got the infamous "Unmounted Disk Volume" error. (I decided to run the Windows Diagnostic tool, and it came up that my hard drive had the error 2000-0142, status 79.) By this time, I had bought an external optical drive, and tried to repair Windows using that. Windows detected problems but couldn't fix them, so I googled around and found a few fixes for the problem. I ran command prompt (from the recovery menu) and used all different sorts of chkdsk commands. After many unsuccessful repairs (many of which took vastly different amounts of time to unsuccessfully complete), I decided to put my old hybrid drive back in.

Now here's the kicker: my hybrid drive now wasn't working, either. I didn't get a specific reason (it was the generic "your computer encountered a problem and had to shut down..." message), but I got error code 0x0000007B. I ran the Diagnostic Tool on the hybrid drive, but there were no errors at all. Windows again tried and failed to repair my drive.

After the hybrid drive stopped working, I figured I might as well try fixing the SSD. I put the SSD back in, and it now had the same generic error that my hybrid drive did. Keep in mind that my SSD had an ENTIRELY different error code before I switched it out two hours earlier.

(TL;DR) So to wrap this up, both of my hard drives are dead (for the record I DO have a spare 320 GB drive if I need it), the system restore on the SSD didn't work, and I have absolutely no idea what to do. The only consistency with my entire situation is that there has always been wild inconsistency, so I don't have much solid info to go on. It seems as though backups didn't work, and absolutely nothing I try can fix either hard drive. As one final side note, I did hook up a new monitor a day or two before both of my drives stopped working, but things were quite iffy before then anyways (so I doubt the monitor has anything to do with it). I've spent at least 10 hours in the past two days rebooting/repairing/using command prompt, but nothing works. I really don't want to destroy a year's worth of data, but I'm running out of options.

So what can I do? Please post ANY suggestions you have, and thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

 

Do a clean install on the SSD, put the HDD in an enclosure and pull the data from it manually. You'll loose your programs on the SSD, but this will rule out any bad installation issues. I have the feeling that the problem was on the HDD all along and that you just cloned it over to the SSD.

 

Thanks. I'm starting the installation now and will update this thread as soon as the re-installation finishes.

 

always worth having who crashed loaded or on a memory stick as imo it gives the best dump report that most of us can read.
worth giving it a run to see if its held the dumps for all the bsod > Resplendence Software - WhoCrashed, automatic crash dump analyzer

 

Ok, so I completely wiped the SSD and reinstalled Windows. Before reinstalling the OS, I backed up my entire hard drive. I just tried to restore the backup (which is about 430 GB), but restoring it does absolutely nothing (that's noticeable).

How exactly do I restore the backup, because I think I'm doing it wrong?

Also, I might add that I can't connect to the Internet and Windows won't let me display 720p.

 

Since both HDD are crashing, sound to me like it could be a hardware problem, maybe RAM. Try to run a Live CD like Ubuntu or PartedMagic.

 

My hard drive isn't crashing anymore, just I can't restore my data or get my computer to run in the correct resolution. I

 

you will need to reload the nvidia drivers again. which did you have loaded before all the problems happened. NVIDIA Driver Downloads - Advanced Search

 

Reload your drivers and you'll be good to go. You are likely running on the stock windows display driver which is only good for troubleshooting stuff really.

 

That explains the resolution, but why won't my backup work?

 

What did you use to backup your data?

 

I wiped and formatted an external HDD, then put my data on that.

 

In actuallity you do not want to just backup. the reason being is you will pull all the problems back into the system. Apparently your drivers or some otherr config in Win7 got botched and caused the flaky performance. You want the new install on the SSD and then from the old running drive start to MANUALLY pull you data back to the working boot drive....................

 

[email protected]

But I wouldn't be using a system image, rather using a backup. Wouldn't that be okay?