steo on 31/8/2010 at 16:06
So I recently bought a new hard drive - a Samsung spinpoint F3 1TB disk - and have installed a legitimate version of Windows 7 Pro x64 on it. When booting Windows, I sometimes get the ntoskrnl.exe is missing or corrupt error which stops windows from booting. Both times this has happened, I've fixed it by booting off the Win7 DVD and running chkdsk -r, but obviously I'm concerned that I've been shipped a faulty HDD and I'm wondering what steps I should take to make sure before I RMA the drive.
Any help is greatly appreciated ;)
Al_B on 31/8/2010 at 19:15
Have you tried running a SMART tool like (
http://www.ntfs.com/disk-monitor.htm) this one? I haven't tried it on my x64 machine, but it reads the in-built status information in the hard drive.
steo on 1/9/2010 at 21:14
SMART Monitoring says everything's fine... I've never been one to put much stock in it though. The drive runs fine usually, I've had it for 20 days now and written about 250GB to it without errors, the only problem with it is booting Windows.
Al_B on 1/9/2010 at 22:14
Can you check whether you actually have a physical file called ntoskrnl.dll in your system32 directory? On both XP and Windows 7 it should be called ntoskrnl.exe (i.e. not .dll at the end). If you have the DLL present then it might indicate a virus or similar issue. I'm usually pretty loathe to jump at the "virus" conclusion for things like this but it's a possiblity given that your hard drive isn't reporting errors.
Did you try running chkdsk /f instead of chkdsk /r from the recovery console last time you had the problem? If /r was the only way to fix it then it would point to a hardware error (motherboard / cable / BIOS / drive etc.) but if /f fixes it then it may mean that chkdsk fixed the startup in addition to performing the sector check.
A final thing that may give a clue is to run bcdedit from a command prompt (with admin permissions if you're in Windows 7) and compare the settings after a successful load and next time you have a problem.
(Sorry - that's a bit of a mental dump of three possibilities)
steo on 3/9/2010 at 14:25
My bad, the error is actually ntoskrnl.exe. Having just reinstalled Windows I've been flooded with errors from programs complaining that they can't find this .dll or the other, it appears to have affected my clarity of mind.
As it happened, the last time I had the error running a regular chkdsk with no parameters had it booting again, which only took a fraction of the time.
Just ran bcdedit from Win7 with the following output:
Quote:
Windows Boot Manager
--------------------
identifier {bootmgr}
device partition=C:
description Windows Boot Manager
locale en-US
inherit {globalsettings}
default {current}
resumeobject {5be37cb0-a82f-11df-a031-8667c7bbf85f}
displayorder {current}
toolsdisplayorder {memdiag}
timeout 30
Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier {current}
device partition=C:
path \Windows\system32\winload.exe
description Windows 7
locale en-US
inherit {bootloadersettings}
recoverysequence {5be37cb2-a82f-11df-a031-8667c7bbf85f}
recoveryenabled Yes
osdevice partition=C:
systemroot \Windows
resumeobject {5be37cb0-a82f-11df-a031-8667c7bbf85f}
nx OptIn
Will run it again off the DVD next it fails to boot.
Thanks for the suggestions.
