I was using the PC, quite a big load on the RAM 4-5 GB out of a total of 6 GB was being used.

Internet bandwidth was completely utilised, Chrome open with many tabs, ripping flac from a CD, testing films I've downloaded and downloading foobar2000 all at the same time.

All of a sudden both screens go black. I wait a while. I press ctrl+shift+esc, the primary screen flickers to my desktop for a couple milliseconds and then back to black. I then tried a load of other shortcut like ctrl+alt+del, win+L, Win+D etc. Nothing. I hit the power button (set to sleep) in the hope that It'll go t sleep and I'll be able to boot up roughly where I left off. On boot up, BSOD then dumps memory to disk. On a fresh boot I now had a flashing underscore post checking nvram message that did nothing.

The commands below aren't in the exact order that I did them as I've started this text file a couple hours after fiddling about trying to figure out what's going on. I did do a /fixmbr and /fixboot (Can't recall if /fixboot went smoothly at his stage as it doesn't execute as it should later on) and rebooted. This was done using a XP recovery disc (I don't know why I didn't use the Windows 7 one) or it could have been my Vista disc (likely not as if remember correctly it doesn't have recovery console on it).

After using the older OS disc to issue commands I had the same problem but now with a underscore and some 5 random symbols that meant nothing to me.

I then have an error on reboot that overclocking has failed, please enter setup to re-configure your system. I chose the option to reset it to default values.

Now on reboot, "Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key".

Recovery consoles bootrec /fixboot gives element not found with a popup saying bootec.exe - corrupt file. c:\My Shortcuts\Drives is corrupt and unreadable. Please run chkdsk utility. It then find the Windows installation and asks it to be added to the boot list. I choose yes and it said element not found.

It's very strange to me that a folder I made My Shortcuts\Drives (.ink shortcut files to all my hard drives) is giving this problem. Preventing me from doing /fixboot it seems.

For some reason now my PC hangs at "Initializing USB controllers .. Done." for a few minutes till it follows through and continues.