Hey guys, I'm having a strange issue with a new notebook HDD I purchased to replace a one that has died. I went ahead and reinstalled Windows Vista SP1 on this laptop and it installed fine without a hitch. Then for some strange reason the screen started flickering as if it was repetitively loading the UAC Admin Approval Window. Pressing CTRL+ALT+DEL seems to stop the loop. When I went to check the administrative logs I got a strange error that said the structure in the disk is invalid.

So I did a disk check on boot and it found some issues with the MFT and appeard to fix them. Upon entering back into Windows vista to check the logs I encountered the same problem. I rebooted into a the Dell Diagnostics partition and ran an extended test on the drive but it found no trouble.

So I killed all of the partitions on the drive using a partition utility and reinstalled Vista from Scratch. Everything seem fine for awhile, so I went ahead and ran some hardware tests on the computer to make sure it is not crashing. I use HOTCPU pro to test cpu, memory and hard disk operations. Well overnight it shut down without any errors, could be an over heat issue, i dunno. After I got back into Windows Vista, I disabled "Automatic restart on system failure" and set the computer to do a small mini dump in case the next time it happened. I went back to HOTCPU to test the system and it failed on the hard drive test saying it can't find the file. I went ahead and ran a scan on the hard drive again and its coming up with the same issue that it needs to fix the MTF again.

Now I know the abnormal shutdown could have caused the file corruption, but its not likely that it would be the same issue with the MFT again. I'm starting to wonder if I'm dealing with some kind of intermittent controller failure. Nothing is showing up in the administrative logs that shows there are any disk errors... Any ideas?

Try a different drive and /or take drive out and run a test on a different computer with the drive.

First you could:
Run a "verify" test using HDDSCan for Winblows. If its ok then you hdd should be "ok"
Found in the files area of this forum.

but most importantly its time to:
Install windows 7.

PS.
Any file corruption will most likely go back to MFT. It can be a completely different file or problem.
What was the error code for the "structure of the disk is invalid"

Good luck.

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I'm doing a scan of the disk right now, and also doing a write test in another computer, so far there doesn't seem to be a problem. Id upgrade this machine to windows 7 in a heart beat, but the customer doesn't want to pay for that of course. It didn't give me an error code at all in the error message. the error came up when I tried to load the Management Console to check the logs and it couldn't find the files associated with the Management Console. so it crashed with a disk structure error.