Hard drive problem or Windows 7 Problem?!

[aeminence]

This is the 2nd time its happened I believe and this time It's far more obvious as to whats kind of going on than with the first time.

I was having a bunch of dll errors on my first install of Windows 7 after a few weeks of building my new rig. It was annoying and I don't really want to have to twiddle around with dll's etc and might as well just reformat and install windows again as It would probably save me the frustration when it comes with dll's.

I have a 60GB SSD OZD Vertex+ for a boot drive and a 1TB WD Black as a secondary drive... After I install Windows 7 on a fresh start, 2 days pass and I install everything I needed too that was essential for me so I install everything and download everything into this 2ndary drive. However I began to get errors such as programs ( like Steam ) that would work fine and flawlessly before but then after a restart or shut down it would tell me Steam wasnt installed at all ( and any programs that were installed , so basically all, that I had to start up when Windows starts up ) and that it needs to be reinstalled... It does this for every program I had installed onto this hard drive.

So I go to 'uninstall' it because I look into the Program Files folder I had created on the 2nd drive and it shows all the programs ARE installed ( this also means that Windows detects the HD. ) but when I go to uninstall the programs it takes long to click into the Uninstall/Change programs page and when it does get there, it shows nothing but whats in my C Drive ( which is basically nothing ).

I'm stumped on whats going on. This is the 2nd time its happened. I can access the 2ndary internal drive just fine but nothing in it thats not a picture won't load or it'll tell me theres an error. Is this the hard drives fault? Or is WIndows the one thats causing this issue?

This issue happened after a simple Restart I let my computer do. Before the restart everything worked fine.

[ilya]

If it's what I think it is, it's Windows 7 being Windows and not playing nice with the southbridge chipset. (personally had lots of similar more severe issues) All you can really do is try uninstalling AHCI/IDE/RAID drivers and trying new drivers directly from the OEM website. If it doesn't work, try third party drivers or changing from AHCI/IDE/RAID (whatever you used to install Windows) to something else and try again.

[aeminence]

Originally Posted by ilya

If it's what I think it is, it's Windows 7 being Windows and not playing nice with the southbridge chipset. (personally had lots of similar more severe issues) All you can really do is try uninstalling AHCI/IDE/RAID drivers and trying new drivers directly from the OEM website. If it doesn't work, try third party drivers or changing from AHCI/IDE/RAID (whatever you used to install Windows) to something else and try again.

If these don't work what are my other options? If I do a clean install is there a setting in Windows etc to avoid this problem? Are the problems within the registrys etc? I tried switching from IDE and RAID and AHCI, everything but AHCI, which I used to install Windows, blue screens me.

[ilya]

Originally Posted by aeminence

If these don't work what are my other options? If I do a clean install is there a setting in Windows etc to avoid this problem? Are the problems within the registrys etc? I tried switching from IDE and RAID and AHCI, everything but AHCI, which I used to install Windows, blue screens me.

Changing between sata controller modes is obviously going to give you blue screens, you need to install the appropriate driver. If you used AHCI to install Windows, start with the AHCI drivers for your chipset downloaded directly from the OEM.

[Perineum]

Run memtest86+ and double check your RAM is good before you do anything else.