Hello,

I was experiencing trouble with Windows 7 stalling at random points, so I decided to backup my data and try to reinstall Windows. It had previously worked flawlessly for 8 months. I spent a lot of time trying to fix the situation, but this is what it came down to.

When I tried to install, I got stuck when selecting a partition to install to. I have 2 drives. The second drive is bootable, and had 2 partitions. When I selected the partition and clicked next it said "unable to find or locate partition." Nothing changed when I deleted, formatted, and created a new partition in this window.

So I went to the recovery console. The Startup Recovery identified a corrupt partition table and supposedly successfully fixed it. I rebooted and tried to install again, but had the same issue. When I went back to the Startup Recovery, it still said that the partition table was corrupted. I tried bootrec.exe /fixmbr -- no change.

The drive is a Hitachi HDS721616PLA380 (160 GB). I downloaded Hitachi Drive diagnostics, tried to delete/rebuild MRB and ran fitness test. No problems -- no change. Right now, I'm trying to erase the entire drive to see if it will do anything. I've also tried Partition Magic and EaseUS Partition Recovery. In both of these programs, I tried fixing the MBR, reformatting, etc. One of them used chkdsk, found errors and fixed them, but still nothing changes and Windows 7 won't install. Microsoft technical support thinks that it may be a HDD issue. They were trying to change it into a basic from a dynamic disk using diskpart, but I had to leave and couldn't finish my work with them. (I can call back and pick up where I left off.)

Opinions? Advice?

Thanks!

That might have been the PC hanging (which can have many different causes), and not a Windows problem, of course.


For the reason above, this may be a waste of your time, if there is actually an underlying hardware problem. You may also have corrupted backups, if there is a hardware fault on that PC (I've seen this happen ).


I get the general idea, but the details are too complex to be easily understood by someone who can't see you doing things step by step, IMHO. In troubleshooting terms, ideally you would simplify your test case to include only 1 drive etc.


That error message about the partition table does not mean that the disk is at fault - the partition table may have been wrongly written to the disk in the first place, or corrupted in transit to or from the disk, or corrupted in memory when read back etc.


While not conclusive (you can't totally rely on tests which "pass"), the lack of an error reported by that test, gives a hint that the disk may be operating correctly.


Not enough detail about exactly what problems chkdsk found and tried to correct, but that just confirms that your system is more sick than just the partition table, as chkdsk found other errors (filesystem inconsistencies? unreadable blocks? something else?) as well.


That's simply a guess on their part. I see no actual evidence of that in the information you've presented here - but there is clearly a problem (or problems) with your system.

PC troubleshooting is off-topic for this forum, so I'm not going to spend much more time on this reply - however there are many possible approaches you could take, depending on how much time, money, equipment and skill you decide to throw at the problem.

One easy way for you to get confidence in that hard disk, is to install it into a different PC (which is currently working correctly); disconnect all other disks, and then install Windows 7 onto your "suspect" hard disk there. I expect it will work perfectly. However, if you haven't already formatted that hard disk, then you may want to keep that disk as-is for a while, until you have confidence in your backups (e..g. by restoring them onto a different disk or system first).

I would suggest running diagnostics (inc memory tests) on your original PC too. What you're looking for, ideally, is a failing test since (as I explained earlier), you cannot totally rely on a test which "passes", to tell you that there isn't a problem.

As I said, there are many troubleshooting approaches you could take, depending on what time, money, equipment (e.g. using other PCs) and skills you choose to throw at this - I've just mentioned a few above. However, from the evidence so far, I see many non-disk faults which would cause the symptoms you describe (motherboard, RAM, power, CPU etc.), so I would not be focussing on the disk, until you have better evidence of a problem there. Unfortunately I can't point you towards a PC troubleshooting forum, if you want help to continue that troubleshooting, as I don't participate in any of those forums. Good luck!