Folks, I have a warning post: Since I installed a fresh Windows 7 on an SSD as Xmas I've been suspicious of how one time in 20 it will stop and say "Bad boot drive" and I have to power off and on again and then it always starts okay. No other symptoms have been observed.
Well today, I was shutting down my PC when it blue screened on the way down, it said SERVICE_EXCEPTION. Just to be safe I rebooted it normally to check it was okay. First problem. IE 32-bit shortcut says it's invalid, but I can see the iexplore.exe in the correct place. Double-clicking it does nothing. The 64-bit iexplore.exe tells me "The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable." Then I notice most of my Start menu All Programs are gone. The Administrative Tools menu is empty. I searched for an hour but none of the advice is relevant or useful. Last known good config recover did nothing. I even thought I had a virus, but found no evidence. Finally I did a chkdsk C: /F and rebooted and I saw about 20 repairs (including iexplore.exe) and now it seems to be back to normal. However I suspect the SSD is about to die unpredictably and all of my mysterious symptoms were side effects. I'm just posting this in case it might be useful for someone in a similar situation. Now I'm going to the shops to get a new SSD and psych myself up for a possible Windows reinstall over the whole weekend. At Xmas it took 4 x 12 hour days to get to a satisfactory working state. *Greg K*
