R9 270X
FX-8320
Gigabyte 970A-DS3P
G.Skill RipjawsX F3 1866mhz (clocked lower) 2x8gb
Corsair CX500M Bronze
Original HDD was a Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 7200rpm
My brother originally came to me because his windows install became corrupted and wouldn't boot. So I just quickly assumed that the HDD was the obvious culprit without thinking too much about it. So he bought a SDD and a new HDD and I reinstalled windows and figured that it was a "mission accomplished" kind of thing. So about two months later, he now has massive data corruption again. So now I'm a bit embarrased because I thought the cause of his issue was so obvious and now it clearly isn't what I thought. So, now that I'd thought about it further, I postulated that it would mostly likely be his PSU, his memory, or maybe his MOBO (a fault SATA header or something).
I haven't ruled out malware but I doubt that's the culprity.
I have a PSU tester, and when it's not under a heavy load all of the voltages are *well* within their tolerable +-5% or +-10% ranges. My little hand tester obviously can't test under load, so I haven't ruled out PSU yet. I ran a memtest and it returned no errors. I bread boarded the system, POST beep codes all came back indicating the BIOS isn't detecting hardware faults.
I made a windows recovery drive, wasn't able to repair startup. Interestingly I was also unable to reset the install because it says that the drive windows is installed on is locked.
So now I'm going to have to use DiskPart to format the drive and perform a clean install, which is all fine and well but I still will be no closer to discovering the cause of the problem, and it will no doubt recur. I'm not finished, I've still got to test the PSU under load and check out the S.M.A.R.T. vitals once I get an OS up again, but I know sometimes even the most obvious problems are shrouded by perspective so I figured I would reach out on here. Surely somebody is more knowledgeable or at least has ideas I've not considered.
Thank you all in advance!
Edit:
I should also add that I've attempted SFC and it wasn't successful.
FX-8320
Gigabyte 970A-DS3P
G.Skill RipjawsX F3 1866mhz (clocked lower) 2x8gb
Corsair CX500M Bronze
Original HDD was a Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 7200rpm
My brother originally came to me because his windows install became corrupted and wouldn't boot. So I just quickly assumed that the HDD was the obvious culprit without thinking too much about it. So he bought a SDD and a new HDD and I reinstalled windows and figured that it was a "mission accomplished" kind of thing. So about two months later, he now has massive data corruption again. So now I'm a bit embarrased because I thought the cause of his issue was so obvious and now it clearly isn't what I thought. So, now that I'd thought about it further, I postulated that it would mostly likely be his PSU, his memory, or maybe his MOBO (a fault SATA header or something).
I haven't ruled out malware but I doubt that's the culprity.
I have a PSU tester, and when it's not under a heavy load all of the voltages are *well* within their tolerable +-5% or +-10% ranges. My little hand tester obviously can't test under load, so I haven't ruled out PSU yet. I ran a memtest and it returned no errors. I bread boarded the system, POST beep codes all came back indicating the BIOS isn't detecting hardware faults.
I made a windows recovery drive, wasn't able to repair startup. Interestingly I was also unable to reset the install because it says that the drive windows is installed on is locked.
So now I'm going to have to use DiskPart to format the drive and perform a clean install, which is all fine and well but I still will be no closer to discovering the cause of the problem, and it will no doubt recur. I'm not finished, I've still got to test the PSU under load and check out the S.M.A.R.T. vitals once I get an OS up again, but I know sometimes even the most obvious problems are shrouded by perspective so I figured I would reach out on here. Surely somebody is more knowledgeable or at least has ideas I've not considered.
Thank you all in advance!
Edit:
I should also add that I've attempted SFC and it wasn't successful.
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