BSOD problem - Smart fails occasionally

pioneer2000 · 17 Nov 2010 at 20:46

Unsure what to think...

One of my Samsung F1's has begun occasionally failing SMART on boot up and Windows will unexpectedly BSOD once loaded.

I've just run Western digital lifeguard (the Samsung utility won't load

) and the drive passed all diagnostics. HDTune reports warning as the drive health on 2 of my Samsungs - but not sure if that actually means much.

What can I do? Obviously something is screwed but not sure if the Smart failing and the BSOD's are actually related (they just started occuring at the same time). One weird point to note is that this happened first upon restarting after installing the latest Realtek HD drivers.... surely that wouldn't cause this.

Philtor · 18 Nov 2010 at 09:08

What I would do is download a linux live CD such as Ubuntu and boot your system with it and see if the same issue still happens. It's unusual to find a HDD causing a BSOD so in the case it does turn out to be the Realtek driver you installed then boot from your Windows CD, select repair your computer and do a system restore. Let us know how you get on.

Vimes · 18 Nov 2010 at 11:53

When you have ran the Estool what problem is it causing you to prevent it from loading...?

What method have you used..?

pioneer2000 · 18 Nov 2010 at 12:39

I've run lifeguard quick test on all my drives and they all pass. Then ran an extended test on the drive I think is failing smart - that passed also.

Have unistalled the realtek drivers and so far seems ok.... happens randomly though so am going to have a look again tonight.

ES-Tool said something about cannot load driver when I booted it from cd. It loaded some of it and then dropped out to the command prompt.

Vimes · 18 Nov 2010 at 12:44

I had made a bootable USB stick so that it booted to a DOS prompt. But before that I went into the BIOS and returned my drives from AHCI mode to IDE mode, just for this test. Then I ran Estool from the DOS prompt and it ran and showed errors with my F4 2TB drive.

finite · 18 Nov 2010 at 12:56

I had that problem the CD is broken, looking around the solution is to make bootable USB stick with the Estool.exe from the CD.

This is the guide I followed

HOW TO: Create a bootable MS-DOS USB key

One thing that threw me is the USB stick appeared blank in Win7 when I copied the estool.exe over.

Estool didn't have any problems finding the drives over AHCI so I left it as is.

The problem I have is the 2 year old F1 1TB drive failed with read errors, but after a low level format it passed. It has a caution for relocated sectors in Crystal Disc info and like yours was locking the PC hard on the previously affected area.

pioneer2000 · 18 Nov 2010 at 20:15

So just got in and booted up. SMART failed on 3 out of 4 Samsung F1's...

Once windows had logged in, it froze and BSOD 24.

So far i've had:

BSOD 24 , 9 and 101.

As I've said, lifeguard scanned the drives and says they are fine.

Obvioulsy had nothing to do with the realtek drivers as i've uninstalled them last night. The only other thing I can think of is that I updated my bios a few days ago...

So, what can I do? Not sure if the hard drives are failing (but would all 3 just go like this?!) or something else is causing an issue with SMART etc.

Could this be a motherboard problem? How can I check that?

Should probably note that after it BSOD and restarted, all HD's passed SMART and windows appears to be working fine....

pioneer2000 · 18 Nov 2010 at 23:04

Anyone?

Vimes · 19 Nov 2010 at 09:09

WD Lifeguard is primarily for.... Western Digital drives

Why don't you just have a read at what has been written above in regards to getting the Samsung disk check utility working on your system and then run that to check each of your Samsung drives..? Then report back with with the precise findings on each and every drive. It will provide a report which you can even take a photo.....

the above shows my Samsung F4 failing the RAM test.

Also run something like HD Tune Pro and take a screen shot when showing the health section for each drive so that people can see the SMART attributes and the raw data values being reported for any potential problem.

I have just had two hard drives faling on me. The first a WD EARS20 2TB drive bought in June and the second a Samsung F4 2TB bought around 30 days ago. So yes you can have multiple drive failure. But unless you run the tools as I have suggested it is going to be hard to give you an informed answer.

finite · 19 Nov 2010 at 10:54

Assuming that is your current motherboard Gigabyte do seem to have had some SATA bios issues with SMART errors from a cold boot, one in particular mentioned every drive except the OS drive failing SMART then passing on the reboot. Others mentioned AHCI hanging.

If you didn't have any issues on the previous bios I would revert to it then run Estool.

pioneer2000 · 19 Nov 2010 at 13:30

I've tried Seagate disc tool as well and that has passed all tests. The samsung ES-Tool is a pile of junk, doesn't boot via USB either.

Seagate specifically say that their tool works with all other manufacturers, so don't think this is actually a HD problem.

Yeah it's a UD5 - Going to try dropping back to an older bios revision tonight.