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HP Pavillion Gaming
Microsoft Windows 10 (64-bit)

Hello.

 

So, for about 2-3 months now I’ve had to deal with constantly reinstalling Windows on my laptop because of some recurring instances of corruption. Occasionally, I will find myself unable to utilize critical drivers or programs (even ones I never use such as Edge), culminating in or sometimes immediately skipping to an unrepairable state, forcing a clean reinstall of Windows. I’ve at least been able to do that reliably. However, it’s completely unsustainable, incredibly annoying, and no doubt an unusual nuisance I would infinitely prefer to not deal with.

 

Every so often I will be prompted to check the disk for errors, and chkdsk scan will find usually something wrong in the system32 and SxS folders. Not fun. I can sometimes repair the issues using that and sfc, but if sfc and dism are toast, I’m out of luck. I’ve performed a comically large number of reinstalls by now, at least 11.

 

I know the hard drive itself isn’t failing as all errors thus far are logical, and no extensive testing has shown that a failure would be imminent, even with SeaGate scans.

 

The notifications seem to appear after certain “intensive” actions such as “keeping a onedrive file on this device” or “screen sharing on discord”. I do indeed do a lot on my computer, but not much more than I did in my first two years with this laptop, which had no problems whatsoever.

 

I’ve had a variety of error messages, but I cannot afford to share all of them due to being unable to determine what would actually be relevant (and reinstallations deleting error logs).

 

I don’t anticipate to solve this in a day, but if anyone could help me figure out what’s going on, I’d be extremely appreciative.

5 REPLIES 5
HP Recommended

@Zoisite 

I'm not trying to start an argument with you ... but with 11 reinstalls, you still claim the drive is not failing? Seriously? What do you thing is causing all these files system corruptions again and again and again?

 

Save yourself major work and grief and STOP doing the reinstalls.  Instead, consider using a free utility to make an image backup of your setup, which will take 10-15 minutes at most, and then when this happens again, boot from the boot USB stick, insert the backup, and restore your PC in under 5 minutes!  A LOT LESS work that reinstalling Windows, all your apps, and redoing all your settings!!

 

------------------------

I personally prefer to use third-party Backup solutions as they tend to be both more flexible and more reliable than any built-in solutions.

Macrium Reflect (MR) provides a FREE version that can be used to image and restore partitions or entire drives.

What I recommend is the following:
1) Download and install Macrium Reflect (MR) from here: http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx
2) Run MR and choose the option: "Create an image of the partition(s) required to backup and restore Windows" to write a full backup to an external drive or USB stick
3) Use the option to create a boot USB stick or CD

My experience is that MR, when using the High Compression option, typically can compress the saved image file to about 60% of the USED space in the OS partition. This means if you have an 80GB OS partition, and 40GB is used, MR only needs about 24GB to store the image file.

I use this all the time and it typically takes less than 15 minutes to do the image backup and about the same time or less to do a restore.

Plus, MR has the option to Add a Recovery Boot Menu entry. This allows you then to boot into WinRE, and you can then use that to do a restore -- when you can't boot into Windows!

NOW, you have the means to restore a full working system from the external drive or USB stick in only a few minutes.



I am a volunteer and I do not work for, nor represent, HP
HP Recommended

@WAWood
That’s um, a really nice advertisement for a service that won’t solve my problem at all. I’m not looking for mitigating measures, but preventative ones. I figure some part is not up to snuff and I want to try to identify it before I spend money where I don’t need to. I appreciate the effort though, and if further diagnostics prove fruitless I may try it. But then, I don’t have any usbs large enough to hold the entire system image or extra hard drives (and the pavillion lacks a disk drive for some godforsaken reason), so money is still a concern.

HP Recommended

Anyhow I don’t really know how this site works, but I might as well convey that I am still having problems and don’t seem to be getting the help I need. I’ll of course try to be responsive to any questions, but I don’t really know what the cause could be specifically. It might even be a missing driver since I wiped out the HP stuff with the clean install.

HP Recommended

@Zoisite 

Yeah I know you want to solve the underlying issue, but with you having messed with the OS and files, there is really no way for us to tell what damage was done -- so we have no idea what to fix.

 

I was only offering an alternative to keep your PC working without you having to go through the pain of reinstalling and reconfiguring Windows frequently.

 

All of my Win10 backups using MR are less than 32GB and even 64GB USB drives are generally available now for under $20 USD -- so we're not talking about a major expense, here.



I am a volunteer and I do not work for, nor represent, HP
HP Recommended

@WAWood

I don’t quite understand. If I work under the conditions of a fresh install of Windows should I not be in the same place as everyone else?

 

In any case, I think for my next install I’ll try Linux this time to determine if it’s a hardware issue or Windows issue. The best I can do at the moment is determine what the causes could possibly be and eliminate suspects through testing. Ideally, of course, I will return to Windows as the Pavillion isn’t powerful enough to run NieR Replicant at proper resolution, let alone under a virtual machine. So, if you could lend your experience and propose some possibilities, I’ll look into what I can.

 

If something is broken, it would be because of me basically not rebooting the computer for weeks at a time, which is very likely the cause of the initial problems. But, what problems that results in I remain uncertain. If anything, I keep having constantly high hard drive activity even at rest (system taking up a lot of the resources in task manager). Yet, the tests I’ve done with SeaTools, suspiciously, do not incriminate the hard drive. I could look into bad sectors sometime. Don’t really know for sure.

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