Computer will not boot after atikmdag.sys error

Hi there,

I’m having trouble starting up my computer, it’s only a few months old and specs are listed at the bottom. I will start from the beginning.

About a month ago my computer started giving me hard drive failure warning messages. At that point I ordered a new hard drive of the same type (it got good reviews, thought maybe mine was the unlucky dud) but because I had a lot of work to do on my computer and these warnings were occurring just about every 15 minutes I clicked the option to stop displaying these warnings. These warnings started to occur shortly after I started disk defrag. Since today I’ve had no problems, the new hard drive arrived but it has been sitting in its box until tonight.

Tonight my computer is idle at the desktop when I get my first blue screen. It tells me atikmdag.sys is the problem and that I should restart. I didn’t write down anything else besides this name. From what I understand, this is an error from my ATI video card.

I restart my computer and my computer turns on, gets as far as “verifying pool data…” then restarts. Sometimes after a restart it sits at a black screen and sometimes it goes through that process again.

I figure I would try the new hard drive and reinstall windows vista, I’ve been backing up all my important files on my thumbdrive anyways. So it starts to boot from disk, it shows a loading bar on the screen saying “loading windows files” or something of the sort but after it’s done loading it gives me a blue screen with the message PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA

Now I’m starting to think that it’s less likely that my hard drive has failed but probably my video card or even my ram. Please let me know what you think, any help is very much appreciated.

System Specs:
Windows Vista 64 bit OS
CORSAIR CMPSU-750TX 750W ATX12V
Intel Core i7-920 Bloomfield 2.66GHz LGA 1366 130W
CORSAIR DOMINATOR 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600
Western Digital Caviar Black WD6401AALS 640GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5"
XFX HD-489A-ZDFC Radeon HD 4890 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express
EVGA 141-BL-E757-TR LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX X58 SLI LE Intel Motherboard