Ccleaner and fatal error blue screen issue

ok so i loaded Ccleaner and it listed a whole bunch of stuff. roughly 304 MB of files. some included cookies, system files, and others but only a few said "marked for deletion". i wasn't sure what exactly it was about to remove so i didn't go through with the clean up process. shortly thereafter, i got a blue screen saying something recently installed on my hard disk was either corrupted or something like that. i had to turn off my computer and try to reboot. it went into checkdsk and deleted some orphan files and some other things but after that it would stay at the windows XP loading screen forever and never load my desktop. long story short i had to reinstall windows. long story short this is a laptop that i bought without a HD, so i bought one, installed windows form scratch, and have been installing drivers and programs such as avg, itunes, photoshop, etc.

anyone have any idea whatsoever about what possibly could've happened?

 

Check the drive for bad sectors, and download the manufacturer's diagnostic utility to see if the drive can still pass SMART testing. The errors you're getting sound an awful lot like the ones I've gotten each of the past two times my hdd began to fail. Also, backup everything ASAP!

 

and how exactly do i backup everything?

 

Simplest, since you can't boot from the drive right now, is to either (i) use a LiveCD (such as a linux variant) or the Ultimate Boot CD to get the thing fired up and then use a disk copying/cloning utility (I believe that UBCD comes with one in the standard distribution, although if it doesn't, you can add one to the mix before burning it onto CD), or (ii) pull the hdd, drop it into an external enclosure, hook it up to another computer (such as the one you're currently posting from) and copy/clone the drive and/or the contents you want to keep. How's that?

 

i can boot from my HD perfectly fine now that i deleted/quick formatted the partition and reinstalled windows. i was thinking that it was something i downloaded while i was setting up the computer before i installed avg anti-virus.

can you or anyone post the link to the acer SMART testing?

 

Actually, you'd need to check with the manufacturer of the hard drive itself. For example, the Seagate diagnostic is Sea Tools, which can be downloaded from here. Since Seagate acquired Maxtor, Sea Tools is also the diagnostic to use for Maxtor drives (as indicated here). The diagnostic utility for Western Digital drives is Data Lifeguard Diagnostic (for Windows or DOS-based), and can be downloaded from here. Hitachi diagnostics can be downloaded from here.

Any of that help?

 

yes thank you for all of your help so far. i really appreciate it. i went to the hitachi link and the SMART test is no longer available for download. i can download the DFT though. do you know anywhere else i can download this test?

 

I believe that the DFT contains a SMART diagnostic utility as well. From the Hitachi webpage describing the Drive Fitness Test comes this snippet:

 

and also, what's up with Ccleaner listing so many things?

 

I've cleaned almost as much weekly. Mostly cookies, history, temp files, etc.

 

yes but it listed a load of system files and things like that also. so whatever it brings up in the box is what it is about to erase?

 

Yeah unless you exclude them under options.

 

CCleaner finds a lot of stuff that is apparently no longer useful because a lot of junk gets left behind, partly by apps when they run (e.g., temp files that don't get deleted when the app closes out, which can happen if the app crashes or "closes unexpectedly"), partly by poorly written installation packages that leave orphaned files behind either when they install or when they uninstall, and partly because _Windows is a messy OS.

That being said, one should be very careful about simply letting CCleaner, or any other system optimization app, have it's way and willy-nilly delete what it thinks is junk. A simple example is cookies - certainly most cookies are files that you don't really want clogging up your file system; however, for sites that you routinely go to, such as NBR, the cookies from those sites are useful (e.g., the NBR cookie helps to keep you logged in across multiple sessions) and letting CCleaner just delete them only gets in the way of using your system in the most efficient manner.

Also, CCleaner can sometimes be mistaken about whether or not a file really is junk or not; in situations where you're not sure that CCleaner got it right, and you don't have the time to research whether or not a particular file is junk or is still needed, it's probably best to keep the file rather than letting CCleaner just delete it.