What a great start of the week. My operating system just bit the dust, taking with it almost 110 GB of data on two external drives. Working to restore my OS from a backup and I'll see if any other data was lost. I wish I could replace this computer, but I can't afford to till I'm done with college. This is the second time the OS has crashed in the last few months. I think the motherboard and/or memory have issues. Working to restore the lost data on the external drives at the moment using Recuva, so I'll see how that goes. So, if you guys don't see me online much for the next day or two, it is because I'm working on bringing my computer back online.

Ouch. Sorry to hear, Turak. I know how tedious and time consuming that process can be.

I'd suggest running MemTest86 to check your memory. You can either run it in Windows or burn an ISO and boot to it to test memory. I'd recommend the latter. If it passes (or at least survives the first minute of testing) then your memory and motherboard's memory bus is fine. Errors would pop up as red messages if there was a problem.

I've used about every testing program known to man on that thing. I don't overclock, the RAM checks out, stress tests on the RAM and CPU are stable, the motherboard, video card, case, primary hard drive, power supply, and some of the RAM have all been replaced over the last two years. I can just never shake the issues. There isn't much left. And the issues will just randomly show up, so it is impossible to easily test if I've fixed it. I can rule out the remaining old RAM as I had it removed for a month or so and had the OS die on me during that time.

Anyway, I'm mostly back online now, and have managed to use a recovery program to recover about 90% of my data that didn't have a backup.

Glad to hear it's mostly back.

You said you used everything, but have you used MemTest86's ISO image burned to a CD and then booted to test? I wouldn't trust anything else to test memory.

The other thing to check for corrupted data is to do a scandisk on your drives. Just go to the properties of the drives in Windows, then Tools, then do a scan and check all options to test. If the drive you're scanning is the OS drive, then Windows will tell you it can flag it to scan on next boot. If that's the case, do a reboot and let it scan.

If your memory is fine, your drives free of bad sectors, and your system is stable enough for gaming, then the problem is most likely software not hardware, as in getting malware on your PC. What browser do you use, what anti-virus app do you use, and what measures do you take to practice "safe browsing"?

Hey RS! Whats up?
Oh and cipher and turak, I like how when you have conversations like that, I haven't the slightest idea what your saying. haha

Bump from the Knights

Bump from the Knights.

Hey RS. For those of you in the US, happy forth. Though I guess I still have 24 minutes till the 4th here in my timezone.

Indeed. Happy 4th of July!

Bump from the Knights