Sorry to hear you have troubles...

Most of the important things are said already. I can only add some advise based on my own experiences.

First of all - overclocking is a bad idea when you want to have a rock-solid system. It puts stress on various parts on the motherboard, and if some parts are just within tolerance it is easy to let them break down. The first thing to do when restoring everything in working order is to clock down to stock speed to make sure everything works within tolerance.  

My first suspect it the memory. Although memory can run at higer-than-designed speeds, it can break down under continued stress. Symptoms are just the things you experiencing now. Random crashes, strange readings, corrupted files and especially failing memory-intensive tasks  (like restoring a backup that uses large chunks of memory as buffer). Just run Memtest a few times to see if everything works fine.

The second suspect is the hard disk interface itself. Higher clock speeds can add to stress and misreadings (timing difficulties) so hardware data correction has to kick in much more often. This can lead to overload and failure of data correction - resulting in bad or corrupted files. If you have a second system I would try to connect the hard disk on that system and do a drive check. If the drive turns out good, you have a interface problem. Unfortunately these interfaces are hard-wired on your motherboard, so it is possible your motherboard has to be replaced (unless you find some PCI SATA card and use that - disabling the interface on your motherboard).

It is possible your hard drive is on the brink of failing. Just take a look at the smart values. If you see something suspicious, immediately stop using that drive! The best way to handle this is to buy a new drive and make a exact copy of the data and sectors on the suspicious drive to the new drive and ONLY use the new drive. That way you make a final HD crash less likely.

I could be your power supply. If the supply just give enough for a standard system, overclocking can put too much strain on the unit. Beware of cheap power supply's.  The advertised output power is most times a peak power, and not a continue power. In other words - those units can deliver peaks of the advertised power, but break down if this power has to be delivered as average..

Well - if those thing are not the culprit, than -indeed- Windows itself can do strange things. Especially updates can have unpredictable side effects on not-commonly used software (and the software we use is not very common in most house-holds I should say). I have worked with very large network systems (mainframe/UNIX/Windows mix), and an update was always something that had to be throughly tested before letting it installing "on the system". There were some very nasty "accidents" in the past that lead to these rules.

This is what came up in my mind in the short term. Good luck with your problem solving. I hope you are up and running in a short time...

Outstanding!

Sorry to MS update for all those things I said about you yesterday.

I'll bet I've called them worse before...

While you're at it FBB, take the opportunity to clean out the inside of your box, get rid of any dust, re-seat all the boards, blow out all your heatsinks with compressed air, visually inspect your MOBO for signs of damaged components.

FastBikerBoy

Jonbouy

Sorry to MS update for all those things I said about you yesterday.

I'll bet I've called them worse before...

Of course I could have saved a lot of time yesterday and just asked the wife. She'd have told me I was wrong, as usual.

Oh, I can hear that.

I'd have got "Why do you have to fiddle with that thing all the time? It worked perfectly well before you started to try to make it perform better!"

(Oo-er!  That didn't come out right.)

Bristol_Jonesey


While you're at it FBB, take the opportunity to clean out the inside of your box, get rid of any dust, re-seat all the boards, blow out all your heatsinks with compressed air, visually inspect your MOBO for signs of damaged components.

This is darn good advise...I'm doing this every 6 months.

Awesome, glad to hear you've got the problem under control. Fantastic support from the community here -- one of the best "features" of Sonar in my opinion.

JClosed nailed it... motherboard components can/do/will degrade over time. More importantly the silicon itself will actually degrade slightly over time and ultimately affect memory timings if you were already running at the edge. 

Been OCing by 25% on the FSB for over a year. In the spring stuff got stupid. Used the Who Crashed util, and a bunch of other stuff.

I updated the BIOS. And "walla!"

What best I can figger is a win update, or a vid driver update, changed how a particular CPU instruction was called.

After the BIOS update running at 25% OC as before.

Glad to hear you are back up and running. Make sure you do a scan with fix errors on your drives in case you did any saves during the ram problems. I found corrupt files when I had the bad ram chip.