[steven123]

I have a problem with my Windows 7 Professional SP1 PC whereby sometimes the screen will freeze and it will not respond but the mouse cursor moves, then typically within a few seconds it goes to a Bluescreen and reboots and on reboot says it cannot find the system disc. Investigating the BIOS directly after the fault reveals the system is not detecting the main system disc (i.e. the C drive). This always happens after the computer reboots with the blue screen. The only way I can get it to work again is turning off the power for a while. Then it recognises the main system disc and can boot from it again.

I do strongly suspect a problem with the system disc as I have had intermittent problems like that described above in the past but have never been able to find out for definite if the HDD really is the problem and the problem has been very intermittent and irregular in that it could be fine for months, then one day have this problem again.

Although, recently it seems to have gotten a lot worse and seems to have the issue much more often. I can usually tell when it is going to happen as the PC will stop responding for a few seconds before it actually bluescreens and reboots.

The problem can happen at any point though typically always seems to be when a number of applications are open and when there is disc activity e.g. it happened when running an anti malware scan, during a software install, when slipstreaming SP1 to my Windows 7 disc. Highly graphically / CPU intensive applications like games don’t seem to bring it on.

In particular I was wondering if there is a program I can use that will thoroughly test my system disc (like memtest for a HDD) to find out for sure if I have a fault on the HDD so I can finally fix this annoying problem.

My PC spec is:
Asus P8 P67 Pro
I5 Sandy Bridge 2500K
16GB DDR3
AMD Radeon 6950 2GB
850 Watt OCZ PSU
Asus Xonar DS Sound card

The HDD I have been having issues with is a Optima 128GB SSD drive.

[Maxatoria]

if SMART is enabled in your bios you can get programs that will read the data and it'll give you all the stats for the drive

theres plenty of stats there to keep you happy and theres plenty of different programs around to read the data from the drive

[max99]

Check the manufacturer's site for diagnostics tools. Also check Google to see if other people are experiencing the same kinds of issues with this range of drives. A firmware update can sometimes fix these stability issues with SSDs.

[Loobster]

Originally Posted by steven123

The HDD I have been having issues with is a Optima 128GB SSD drive.

... but you don't say what SATA interface or chipset it uses, so we are limited in how to respond, other than to say that it is definitely an issue with the SSD.

If it runs a third-gen (SATA 6Gbps) SandForce chipset then you should know that these are plagued with reliability problems and you should seek a firmware update immediately to attempt to alleviate your issue.