Hard Drive Bad And still pass all Test?

[HouseOfTechs]

How did you do the factory restore? I kept having the same problem too, as long as I was doing the factory recovery by using the F8 repair option. Once I performed the factory recovery using the manual method of extracting the "factory.wim" file, which is located in the recovery partition, using imagex, everything worked fine.
One thing you can try is installing an OEM copy if Windows 7. When doing this, delete the partition you are installing it to but leave the recovery partition intact. If this fixes your problem then it's probably the same issue I had and I can probably walk you through doing a factory restore using imagex and the "factory.wim" file on the recovery partition. If it doesn't, then you know for sure it's hardware.

yes i was doing it by using f8 and i will try to install with oem disk and leave partition in tact.. For the manual method is it better to put the factory.wim on a cd or can i apply it from the recovery partitions drive?

 

[AlaDes]

yes i was doing it by using f8 and i will try to install with oem disk and leave partition in tact.. For the manual method is it better to put the factory.wim on a cd or can i apply it from the recovery partitions drive?

You can apply the image directly from the recovery partition, which is what I did. You can actually try this first versus doing an OEM install and save yourself the time of doing 2 installs if this way solves your problem. However, if you do the manual factory recovery and are still having issues, I'd still try an OEM install because it could be a corrupted wim image.
Personally, I have had 3 computers in my shop with a similar problem and two of them were BSODs, even after doing the F8 factory restore. The manual method fixed all three of them.

 

[HouseOfTechs]

You can apply the image directly from the recovery partition, which is what I did. You can actually try this first versus doing an OEM install and save yourself the time of doing 2 installs if this way solves your problem. However, if you do the manual factory recovery and are still having issues, I'd still try an OEM install because it could be a corrupted wim image.
Personally, I have had 3 computers in my shop with a similar problem and two of them were BSODs, even after doing the F8 factory restore. The manual method fixed all three of them.

Factory.wim file was messed up i installed it manually and got the same result! Computer contained viruses when i scanned it with a rescue cd.. could a virus of affected the recovery partition?

installed win 7 from disc and worked great..

Hdd was good after all

 

[AlaDes]

Factory.wim file was messed up i installed it manually and got the same result! Computer contained viruses when i scanned it with a rescue cd.. could a virus of affected the recovery partition?

installed win 7 from disc and worked great..

Hdd was good after all

How did you install the factory.wim exactly? It actually may not be messed up. You can't just make the restore partition active, as a means of automatically starting the restore process on the next boot, on a Dell the way you can on an HP. You have to use imagex to extract the file from the recovery partition to the partition you want the OS on. If you would like to see if this will work or not just let me know and I'll be more than happy to give you detailed instructions on how to do it.
Whether or not a virus can affect a recovery partition is debatable. Personally, I feel that it affects the boot configuration data (bcd) file in some way and is why the normal method of factory restoring a PC doesn't work. I am not a bcd expert by any means and found that completely destroying the windows partition was the easiest way to solve my problem.