Hello everyone,
My G74Sx recently went through a BSOD/crash loop and although I never determined the underlying cause I did get it working (temporarily) again. I thought it could be my hard drive or RAM going bad, but I'm not sure. I'm hoping someone here has some advice. I will outline the general symptoms and if you need any other logs or whatnot let me know.
G74Sx, Intel i7-2630QM @ 2.00GHz, Bios Version American Megatrends Inc. G74Sx.201, 4/27/2011, 12 GB RAM
1. Since I bought the system in Sep 2011, it has never booted up from hibernation/sleep very well. On startup, it was generally very slow and acted overloaded. It was easier to restart and then it would be fine.
2. Earlier this month (3/6 or 3/7), I was watching a movie and it suddenly froze. The audio continued to play. And when I went to task manager to cancel, I could interact with explorer.exe without any issues. However, the movie image remained frozen in the background behind my taskbar. I shut down the computer correctly.
3. On subsequent start up, it failed to start and BSOD'd. It would go through an endless loop of the Windows logo, act like it was going to start, and then BSOD.
4. I couldn't find my repair/restore CD, so I ordered one off Amazon. I was able to run this successfully. Oddly, it repaired the first time and everything passed (even though there was still 1 root cause). Even though it repaired, it would not boot. So I ran the repair two more times.
5. At the end of the 3rd repair, I went into BIOS and changed from ACTA to ICE. After that, the system booted. I will not pretend to know why this worked and only tried it on a whim after seeing it worked for someone else on a forum. Why would this make a difference?
6. The system has been fairly stable until now. It doesn't seem to be running at full capacity (still hangs a bit).
7. A few days ago, it started CHKDSK when booted. It has continually done this, I'd say 75% of the time. The first few times it found nothing, yesterday it found a few corrections in the index.
I'm at a loss here. Any suggestions? Is my hard drive slowly going bad?
Thanks so much for your time and help.