System Restore when won't boot?

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NJAldwin

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Mar 26, 2013
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This morning a little after 3, my system blue screened and has been stuck in an endless cycle of reboots following blue screens. Each blue screen seems to have a different error -- very frustrating!

From what I understand, 3am is the scheduled time for system maintenance, so after some limited testing, I think a driver may have gotten upgraded and ruined my system. So I figured I'd do a system restore to a point last week when Windows Update ran. Apparently, when I tell it from the diagnostic menu to do a system restore, it says "ok, I'll just restart into Windows" which of course then fails with a BSOD. Is there any way to get it to do a system restore without booting into Windows, which does not work?

This system is a little over a week old. I am very displeased. I've been thinking about wiping the drive and reinstalling Win8, but then I'd have the hassle of installing all the drivers again, and an update with this corrupted driver would probably just tank the system again.

Any thoughts or help on this?

FYI, it's a brand new system with
Sabertooth Z77 -- stock
i7 3770 -- stock
16GB G.Skill DDR3 -- this was running at 1600 (its rated speed) but I tried kicking it back to the default, with no changes
Several different hard drives of varying ages, but the main drive is a brand new 1TB Velociraptor.

As I said, I seem to be getting a lot of different errors in the BSOD, ranging from KERNEL_SECURITY_CHECK_FAILURE to SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION to BAD_POOL_HEADER to MEMORY_MANAGEMENT (I seem to get that one the most) (there are more that I got but I can't remember the others off the top of my head).
 
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neieus

neieus

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Dec 29, 2011
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You could load into safe mode and by using msconfig disable the driver you think is causing the problem. You could also try using your windows disk to perform a system repair. Another option would be to check the bios version of your board and see what the current version is and if it relates to your problem.
 
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dodger46

dodger46

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Sounds like hardware to me. Try reseating your RAM Sticks, run with one removed at a time if that doesn't help. If it still fails to boot, use the Install disk to get to the Troubleshoot Menu and Refresh your PC. If you can't do that, it's not impossible that your HDD is kaput, even though it's new. You may have an HDD diagnostic test in your BIOS.
Outside chance it was the Windows update, in which case the Refresh should work, and you can disable Auto updates till you get to the bottom of it.
 
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NJAldwin

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Tried system repair -- it said that it failed :/

I'll check the BIOS a bit later. Right now it's stuck scanning and repairing the drive.
 
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NJAldwin

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Tried reseating and even swapping the RAM sticks. Was going to run memtest86 on them but as you can see here I was unsuccessful in that endeavor as well.

The refresh did not work, no reason given. I tried refreshing both from the troubleshoot menu and from the menu in the Windows 8 CD itself.

The system's currently running a scan on the drive -- but in what way could it be kaput? It seems to be able to load at least some stuff off of it, so it's not completely dead... I did notice that it was louder than my old velociraptor, but I didn't notice any abnormal clicking or anything. The scan is currently stuck on 27%...maybe that's indicative of a problem...
 
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dodger46

dodger46

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Not unusual to have bad sectors on a new drive, I've recently replaced 3 Seagates which failed in Dell laptops after a few weeks. Depending on the scan, if it's chkdsk /f /r then your drive may be usable for a time as bad sectors will be ignored in future. I would RMA it for a new one, you may need to backup your claim with an error code from WD's diagnostic
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=606&sid=3
 
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NJAldwin

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So the disk check was stuck at 27% for at least four hours. Then it eventually completed (or failed through) after like 9 hours (I was asleep) and it's back to the BSOD-reboot cycle. I'm RMA-ing the drive to WD, and we'll see if that solves it. Not too excited at the prospect of reinstalling Windows and all the drivers :/

Does anyone know if I have to call up MS to deactivate the Windows serial # so I can reactivate it on the new drive?
 
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dodger46

dodger46

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Shouldn't need to as it's only the drive and not major hardware. Any hassle with activation, just do a Refresh your PC before you install progs and it will activate.
Did you get any errors from the disk check? Assuming it was chkdsk, read log here
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/96938-check-disk-chkdsk-read-event-viewer-log.html
swap 'Start Screen' for 'Start button' to access Event viewer

 
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NJAldwin

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Unfortunately, can't check if chkdsk got errors because it won't boot into Windows.

I was finally able to run memtest86, and it's showing errors. Looks like I have some bad RAM. Could that be causing all of the problems? Or is it likely that the disk might have problems, too?
 
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NJAldwin

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I'm RMAing the RAM. New RAM should be here hopefully by the end of the week. Western Digital's Quick Test isn't reporting any errors on the disk. None of the SMART-reading tools on UBCD has been able to give me a reading on the attributes of the disk. Maybe when the RAM gets here it'll boot into Windows and I can see what's up then. Not sure if I should cancel the disk RMA or not... Thoughts?
 
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NJAldwin

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Update: got new RAM, which passes memtest. Windows boots. I'm running a chkdsk just in case anything got messed up while running with the bad RAM.

The new disk is already in the mail, so I'll be swapping the old one out when it arrives. Maybe I'll just do a straight disk copy if the old one isn't as messed up as I thought.
 
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geekykido

geekykido

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Sounds like you need to boot from your recovery cd, here you can access a restore point. Just boot from the Windows 8 cd or median. Now, if you used the digital version, you can try to burn the RTM trial to a disk and do it from there...let me know if it helped :)
 
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dodger46

dodger46

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Sounds promising, there's always the slim chance that either the memory controller or mobo are at fault when experiencing memory problems, so memtest pass is encouraging. Looks as if you're on the road to recovery...

 
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