I've tried everything I can think of to fix Windows 7.

[omega21xx]

This may belong in some help section that I could not find. Pardon any errors as I'm doing this post from my phone.

I've got the black screen of death. After post where it should look for windows and begin booting, all I get is the dreaded screen and blinking cursor. There is no sign that it is attempting to read my SSD either.

I'll start where I think the problem originated, I bought Diablo 3, played got off, surfed the internet, middle of surfing my pc decides to go into shut down mode. I let it, turn it back on worried something bad could have happened. I did a thorough search for viruses, Trojans, ect. Sure enough, found rootkits installed on my pc (or so my AV said)
After removing them as it seemed to, I left the house, came back got on the pc played Diablo 3, got off, went on the internet surfing again, sure enough, goes into shut down mode again. I was pissed at this point and pressed reset. I have all my settings set to ALWAYS mention if I want to shut down to prevent random things like this, so I pressed reset feeling confident nothing could be done to my system files.
After the reset I get the the black screen of death. I assume, "oh, I'll just repair the mbr or whatever" acts like all is well, restart, same result. I go through checking to see which OS's can be found using scanos in cmd, only finds my windows.old files... Wtf?

All my files on the drive are intact, I've already begun copying the files from a linux live usb. Is there anything I can do short of a full reinstall?

To be honest, with all the hacking stuff I've heard about on Diablo 3, anyone think Diablo 3 is the cause (indirectly due to hackers?) Maybe the rootkits were related to how Diablo 3 accounts were getting hacked? Let's say they are Diablo 3 related, I've only visited the official blizzard site, and played the game, with peerblock running everyday.

Any help is appreciated, doing a reinstall means a lot of trouble such as reinstalling software that I may have lost CD's for, and especially having to reinstall d3 as I'll have to call blizzard and get a new activation for my reinstall.

 

[Pinhedd]

Even if a hacker could gain remote control via Diablo 3, applications in Windows 7 are well enough sandboxed that it's difficult for them to modify system files. Doing so is a hard enough task even with Administrator access

Use CrystalDiskInfo to get some health information about your SSD, it could be failing

 

[lycros]

Could be the PSU. Lots of wacky things can happen when your PSU is going bad.

Anything you can swap to test would be helpful to narrow down the culprit.

Also you don't need a new activation for D3, you log onto your bnet account at battle.net and download the installer, then just log into the game like normal after you've reinstalled (or use the disks if you got the hard copy). If it asks for an activation code just say you have one/don't need one. The activation code is just to activate it on your account not on your computer.

 

[omega21xx]

Even if a hacker could gain remote control via Diablo 3, applications in Windows 7 are well enough sandboxed that it's difficult for them to modify system files. Doing so is a hard enough task even with Administrator access

Use CrystalDiskInfo to get some health information about your SSD, it could be failing

I considered this, the ssd works glorious in other environments as I'm copying the whole disk to a new drive.
I understood it was unlikely it could be the cause, but its strange that the shut downs start as soon as I start playing Diablo 3. Before having the game its always been fine, which is why I mentioned as a potential cause.

I'll google that program.

 

[omega21xx]

Could be the PSU. Lots of wacky things can happen when your PSU is going bad.

Anything you can swap to test would be helpful to narrow down the culprit.

Also you don't need a new activation for D3, you log onto your bnet account at battle.net and download the installer, then just log into the game like normal after you've reinstalled (or use the disks if you got the hard copy). If it asks for an activation code just say you have one/don't need one. The activation code is just to activate it on your account not on your computer.

Well I know my psu is fine, tested it already, gpu is fine, CPU is fine, as is the board and ram. Only possibility is hard drives or a software corruption.

Pinhead, I guess I'll have to test it in another computer as that isn't a linux program. Any suggestions?

EDIT: decided to do a little experimenting. Installing windows 7 over again and will be pasting old files and registries and so on to see if I can get it back in order. May not work at all, could be buggy as hell, but I figured I might as well play with my options.

 

[omega21xx]

Found the problem. Makes me feel stupid, but I have no clue how this could have happened. For some reason I had to use diskpart to set my windows install partition as active. After that it went right away.

 

[djscribbles]

I would recommend backing up your data on the SSD, and making regular backups. Really odd things start happening when SSDs fail (it is not similar to what you see when an HDD fails), when my Wife's failed, it started out not too bad (I'm pretty sure we had the PC just shutting down), I was able to copy files for a while using a boot-able linux thumb, but after a while the drive would just disappear mid copy.

It may not be the SSD, but just be cautious and take steps to protect your data.

Also as a note, I doubt playing Diablo3 will give you viruses, more likely you've had them for a while, or got them surfing the web, and they may be unrelated to the problem you are having.

 

[arson94]

If you've already backed up your data, it might not be a bad idea to reinstall anyway. I know it's a pain the @ss, but some rootkits aren't that easy to clean.

 

[pauls3743]

Something else you can do is to check to see if there are any firmware updates for your SSD.

I had been getting problems with my SSD, specifically it would run for a few hours, stop responding and disappear from the system. I'm still getting problems with my system but no longer related to the SSD.