I got new hardware for my desktop recently and my dad insisted on reformatting the hard drive, and now that I have some stuff back on, Windows crashes all the time and has ended up being corrupted and corrupting my files at least twice. This new hardware has been in only a little over a week. It seems to crash when Firefox is open and CPU usage is high. I found that the version of Firefox that I had had a bug that caused file corruption, so I downloaded the newest version, but it still crashed. It just so happened that this fucker, whatever it is, corrupted my log for my polyphasic sleep experiment and destroyed my data from the first day, so I'm mad as shit right now, and I want a solution fast.

It is possible that your hard drive is near the end of its life and your about to completely lose the hd. Or your new hardware is a jerk to you and you should remove it.

Are you running Vista? I have encountered and/or heard of issues relating to Vista and Firefox on multiple occasions, although a definite diagnosis was never had.

What kind of new hardware?

Could it cause overheating problems? Check your hdd. Open your case and touch it (I don't trust programs). It shouldn't be much warmer than your hand, if it it so hot that you can barely keep touching it, then you need to improve air flow in your case.

Run scandisk or related program at boot time.
Check temps as others have said.
If hdd has S.M.A.R.T., run a check using SpeedFan. It will give you a *rough* idea on the hdd's health.

What brand is your hard drive anyways?

I'm running XP, and the hard drive is by no means old, I got it last Christmas. The hard drive is a Seagate ST3400633A SCSI, the processor is a Pentium E6300 2.8 GHz dual core, the motherboard is some kind of Asus, the video card is an ATi Radeon x1800. It also has 4 GB of Corsair DDR2 RAM running at 1066MHz and I think a 500 or 550 watt power supply. Everything I just listed is new for me, the only things that weren't just recently bought are the hard drive and the video card, the video card having come out of my brother's computer.

In other news, last night, I tried reinstalling the drivers for my video card, and it told me I needed the new Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0, and then it crashed. Also running was Firefox with about 7 25-minute videos buffered and waiting.

Edit: Apparently, my other edit didn't make it into the first post because I forgot to post it before the computer crashed, but while probing around in the device manager last night, I found an unknown device on my video card that had no drivers. I found that it was the VIVO (which I never use), so I disabled it. That's why I decided to try a reinstall of my video card drivers.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jul 27 2009, 12:18 am by FatalException.

Your processor could be overheating, try checking out what it's temperature is at using Everest, the temperature is under Computer>Sensor.

Well, there's no temperature given for the processor, but the motherboard is only at 27 degrees (Celsius) and the HDD is at 41, which isn't that bad, is it? I'll play TF2 for a while I and check it again.

Also, I successfully reinstalled my video card drivers, but it still says there's an unknown device on my video card, and I'm pretty damn sure that it installed the WDM driver it needed.

Use coretemp dont use everest

http://www.alcpu.com/CoreTemp/

Core Temp lacks the larger CPU support that Everest does, doesn't even work on my Dual Core Pentium D.

Why would a processor overheating cause harddrive errors?

Everest does not work for my Core2duo the temp shown is the starting temp it never changes.

Because he says the computer crashes and the overheating of the processor leads to automatic shutdowns which leads to hard drive corruption

Update: Even after a lot of gaming, the temperatures of the hard drive and motherboard only increase by a few degrees, so I imagine that overheating isn't the problem. Also, probably something VERY IMPORTANT, it hasn't crashed while I'm doing something since when I unsuccessfully tried to reinstall the video drivers, but it does crash if I leave it idle with Firefox open. I'm not sure that it's Firefox that does it, but I've been leaving my computer with all those videos buffered to go do something else, and every time I come back, it's crashed. I'll do some tests to see if it crashes when the screensaver starts, or when it tries to go back the user menu, and if it's Firefox that does it or not.

You said problems started when you installed another video card?
Then uninstall it physically and use your onBoard gfx chip and see if that solves it.

It might be your power supply. High end gfx cards need a shitload of power, and even power supplies with plenty of watts can have problems if they are bad quality.

Well, I doubt that the issue, if it is overheating(Nude's is a pretty good reason too), the issue is the CPU overheating, the entire computer crashing, and the harddrive not setting it's head before turning off.