I'm trying to fix a Lenovo 3000 N200 Model 0769 with a pentium dual core processor, a WD 160Gb #WD1600BEVS-08RS hard drive, and 2Gb RAM running Windows XP sp3 Home. Could not find the restore CD, but have a copy of the OS on CD.
A few months ago, the system crashed while I was using the computer and would begin this endless loop of trying to restart windows and then failing. I suspected a failing HD, so I tried to put the drive into an external enclosure and plug it into my desktop PC. It was not seeing the drive, so I bought a tested one (same model) from the internet. Later, I was successful in bringing the OS back up again and immediately began copying files to a backup drive. Every so often, while copying image and video files, the OS would crash again and I'd restart successfully. I suspected corrupt files or bad HD sectors. Eventually, it quit loading Windows altogether. I received the purchased replacement drive, however, when I plugged it into the laptop, it didn't seem to find it and I guessed that it had not been formatted yet.
I took it into work where we publish a software database and plugged it into the Windows 7's mother board SATA plug and successfully detected and formatted the new drive. I also plugged in the "failing" drive, which it detected and ran a scan on it, automatically detecting and fixing any bad sectors. It seemed to complete successfully and when I plugged the drive back into it's laptop bay, the OS loaded fine. I resumed backing up the rest of my files and continued using the computer for about another month. The problem has since reoccurred. It would simply crash. Upon restart, I get the following blue screen error message:
A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer
UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME
This message flashed so fast, I had to take a video and stop it at the exact moment to read it.
And after a few attempts to reload windows in the last known good config I got this one:
A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer
A process or thread crucial to system operation has unexpectedly exited or been terminated
...
Technical information:
*** STOP: 0x000000F4 (0x00000003, 0x8933F020, 0x8933F194, 0x0805237A8)
I've not recently installed any new programs. I was running Avast and have had no recent virus activity that I was aware of. The only new hardware I added was several months ago when I spilled a bit of beer on the keys and had to buy a new keyboard for it, however, while the keyboard wasn't functional I simply plugged in an external one and everything was fine until this recent crashing issue.
I've tried starting the OS normally, in all of the safe modes, and with the last known good config and none worked. Then I tried to install the new hard drive and install Windows fresh onto it, but I get a message saying that no hard disk drive was detected. I returned the old drive and was successful at getting a Reatogo boot CD to run its CD-based OS and was able to start a new task through the Task Manager and ran a command prompt window. I was able to read the old drive's directory via DOS. I couldn't seem to get chkdsk /r to do anything...I'd type it, hit enter, and it just entered to the next line and sat there doing nothing. I also tried fixboot, again with the same result.
Any help I can get would be very much appreciated.
