Sudden, severe instability problems, unsure how to begin diagnosis

pavel-

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Jun 7, 2007
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Hello,

A couple days ago, I've started experiencing severe instability issues on my machine. The issues are:

  • ■ applications become unresponsive shortly after booting, once this begins happening all applications stop responding and I have to hard reboot the pc (the mouse and keyboard remain operable)
    ■ sometimes following reboot, the pc fails to detect the drive and tries to boot from the wrong hard disk, rebooting sometimes fixes the issue and after adjusting the boot order, the system boots into Windows

This may point to a problem in the drive itself (it's a Crucial M4 64GB SSD) or the controller, or could be an entirely new issue -- I don't really know where to begin in diagnosing it. The OS being used is Windows 7 Professional. (Motherboard is ASRock Extreme4, don't recall the generation but I purchased it in June 2011 -- both of the SSDs are plugged into the SATAIII ports governed by the Intel controller, not Marvell).

The only thing that has changed recently in terms of software/hardware installations is I installed Dota2-beta and played it for, perhaps, 2-3 hours. The game itself was installed on another SSD in the pc that is used solely for apps/games (no OS).

Could this be a software issue (corrupt OS files?) Or does the boot order changing and problems with drive detection point to drive or controller problems? How would you recommend I proceed with testing/diagnosis?

Things I've tried:

  • ■ Swapped the 2 SSDs between the two SATAIII ports, same issue
    ■ Booted using Ubuntu LiveCD, checked dmesg and found no errors or warnings, however, fdisk -l does NOT list the drive as connected, hence I'm unable to mount it
    ■ When I managed to boot successfully into Windows I've run a number of HD Tune Pro diagnostics and found no errors


Any advice or ideas appreciated.
Thank you.