so i have a dell studio 1558. to say its been problematic is a understatement. its just over a yr old. as of late twice now over the past few months. i will be on the laptop. all of the sudden it just shuts down like i hit shutdown button. then will try to reboot and fails. will run startup repair but never repairs. i always have to go into my windows 7 cd or a startup cd. do cmd promps and restore the bootsector. after this it boots fine. the time before the last time. i went as far as to restore my factory recovery image. redoing all my programs and anytime upgrade to windows 7 64 bit ultimate from there. this time i just fixed the boot sector. what is causing this? is my hd about to fail? do i need to do a full wipe removing dells factory image and just do a clean full install? its really starting to be annoying. i have 2 other machines running windows 7 ultimate 64 bit. none of the experience these issues.
ofcource your other installations don't have this issue, it's not even related to 7 afterall, better check the hdd with chkdsk, if your bootsector/bootloader gets corrupted all the time there might be firmware issue on the hdd or its falling apart and has to be replaced.
i have ran chkdsk a few times . always comes back with no problems. its a Hitachi HTS725050A9A364 500gb 7200rpm. its like 14 months old. i did a google search for firmware updates but turned nothing up. im hoping i doesnt have to be replaced. would be just my luck the systems literately 3 months out of warranty.
I had a WD 500GB HDD fail a month ago; 31 days after the warranty expired. Stuff happens and the cost was not such that a new drive was going to be a burden. So I replaced it ... problems solved. If you've ruled out everything else, then failing hardware is likely the problem. My wife's laptop did exactly what you're describing: instant shutdowns for no apparent reason ... her battery was gone. New battery = no more problems. If I were you I'd restore a system image first if I had one but sounds to me like your drive is failing fast. Backup, backup, backup.
ya im fully backed up checked on Hitachi site said still warrantied so i wrote them ,. see where it goes.
fyi i havent had a single corruption as of late. i was googling and found someone with a similar issue. they remoced dell data backup.that fixed theres. i did the same. no more issues over a month now.
First thing I do with any "store bought" computer is uninstall all the vendor supplied crapware. If I need crap on my machine, I'll choose the crap to be installed.