Scott Mueller's Upgrading and Repairing PCs Forum

A customer's computer is having problems with the boot congfig files repeatedly corrupting. It's running Windows 7.

Each time this happens, he boots into the Recovery Environment from a Windows DVD, which runs the automatic startup repair, which always fixes it.

The really strange thing is though, that this was happening on a PC which is no longer being used (due to motherboard failure - another story!), but exactly the same problem is happening with a new PC. The new PC is also running Windows 7, but a completely different model and manufacturer.

The only common factor between the old and new PCs is that they were running both Bitdefender and Acronis Backup. Bitdefender has now been uninstalled, replaced by AVG. But the problem still regularly happens (around once every week or so.)

I wondered if there was a possible explanation for this?

In both cases I would suspect a bad cable, drive or motherboard. Try replacing the cable first, then the drive. Let me know what you find. Scott.

Thanks very much for the reply.

I've changed the data cable and see what happens.

An update:

The computer wasn't in use much for a couple of weeks after I changed the SATA data cable due to holidays. But apparently in the last two weeks or so there hasn't been a problem, so it looks like that might be the answer. Thanks very much Scott!!

(I realise now this should be in the hardware section!)

What still puzzles me (and is the reason I didn't go down this route before), is that I would have expected a faulty data cable to affect random files at random times, not just the same boot file at startup. (And the unlikeliness of it happening on two entirely different computers, although I know coincidences like this do happen.)

One interesting thing I did find, is looking in Event Viewer, I could see boot errors logged back when Windows was originally being set up by the manufacturer, which I hope I'm right in saying does fit with a hardware fault.

With parallel ATA it seemed that a bad cable simply didn't work. With Serial ATA I've seen several incidences where a bad cable appeared to work most of the time, but would cause strange problems such as lockups and corrupted files. At the 3Gbps and 6Gbps speeds the frequency of the transmission is mind-boggling, it is a wonder it works at all.


That may have been caused by the defective cable as well. Scott.