Hi all, I dual boot Win 7 with Mint 17. They are both on the one disk in obviously different partitions. I am having serious issues with the screen going black, then the PC totally freezes with no choice but to press the power button and shut down. This happens from a few seconds to half an hour or maybe a bit longer, mainly on Windows. It's happened only once on Mint and that was when I watched some video I took in a game on Windows. The thing is, it won't stay on long, so I'm not sure I can format and reinstall windows. In Mint, (I can mount my C drive) my windows drive is available to me. Can I just click on Format and it will work? Maybe a dumb question but I'm not experienced with this. Thanks for any help

First, I'd try unmounting the Windows partition and using fsck to check and perhaps repair it. If that doesn't help, this thread has a section on how to test a hard drive to check if it's in good condition:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...re-4175461588/

To reformat a partition, the easiest thing to use is gparted, which you should have or which Ubuntu will install.

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Doing a filesystem check seems like a much more logical solution. If you format, you lose all the data.

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You ought to use windows to format windows. The current version of ntfs isn't fully supported by linux as far as I remember.


In most cases you install windows from dvd and then will have to fix your grub again or fool with bcd to get chain loaded to mint.

I might be tempted to run memtest a day or so first. Check psu maybe and the capacitor issue on motherboard.

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Hi,

I suggest that you use the MS windows tools to check and repair the filesystem with 'chkdsk /f'.
Hope this helps.
Have fun & enjoy!

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I recently went threw this then the system died all together. Your cpu could be going bad if you haven't had any problems with your dual system before. The heat goes up and the cpu locks up and yuor system freezes. The reason this happens more on the windows partition is that windows requiers more juice to run than linux. This is also why your system stopped after watching a video, more of a load was needed from your cpu and it locked up. Try this load this gadget http://www.ehow.com/how_8334755_chec...windows-7.html monitor your heat put a load on you cpu (play a movie) and watch the temps when your system freezes. Then do the same with linux mint http://technicalworldforyou.blogspot...-harddisk.html
I hope it's not hardware, software is cheap to fix.
Jonnynitro138

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If it is getting hot then open up the case, clean out the fans and evict any dust bunnies in there. Dust build up will eventually kill many computers.

Thanks everyone for your replies. There is more to this problem now. I have replaced my graphics card with the old one and everything works fine. Just to fill you in. I had an ATI HD 6870 1G vram graphics card and replaced it with Sapphire Dual-X R9 270x 2G vram. I play a heavily "modded" game of Skyrim. The old card ran fine but I was running out of VRAM, so bought the new card. Not long after, I began to get the black screen total computer lock up. After months of this I finally got the computer shop (where I got the card) to replace with another card. The new card is R9 270X Dual-X OC version. The new card worked great for about 2 weeks, then same crap started to happen. I thought it was Skyrim doing the damage, but it started happening when idle. Then happened on my linux partition as well. Also, my computer won't keep the right time, even with new CMOS battery. Anyway, put the old card back in..no problems except still loses time. I set it every morning. So my R9 270x is an expensive paperweight.

I think your having driver issues so if I was you I would look into what drivers are for your system in linux. That is a AMD card I think. To reformat a system over a driver well I just do not see it that way. let us know after the driver upgrade for that card.
you will need to check for proprietary drivers in mint. and hope they got it right. Mint pretty good about some stuff.

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