Can someone explain to me how this can be?

Restorer

Restorer

Restorer

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Joined
11 Jun 2005
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88
For months I have had a number of irritating intermittent problems: trouble booting, Windows grinding to a halt for up to a minute whilst multi-tasking and then continuing (bit like ANRs in Android), frequent corruption of downloads. Sometimes fiddling in the case was enough to get a week or two without issues but they always returned after a while.

I tested and swapped out all the likely candidates - cables (when I was getting booting problems it seemed to work better with the case on its side!), HDDs (I have 3), memory, PSU (replaced it in any case).

All passed the Seatool tests with flying colours but it turns out here is where I made my big mistake. I ran the short diagnostic tests on all 3 drives but since 2 of them are only used for storage I only ran the long write tests on the drive with the OS. It passed fine and the 2 storage drives passed all the short tests and I thought no more of them.

In the end I was getting so desperate I decided to run the full tests on the storage drives and eureka one of them failed with irreparable bad sectors.

I am elated to have finally got to the bottom of this but I would be really grateful if someone could take a little time and explain to me just how a drive used only to store media could wreak such havoc with my system? I understand now how it was the cause the booting problems. But on the vast majority of occasions when it was up and running fine all day, how could it have been responsible for corrupted downloads onto a completely different drive :confused:? And how could it cause IE and other programs to hang for a time and then resume when the drive was not being accessed for anything?
 
Check. (in management console)

Windows has a habit of making 1 drive boot, 1 system if it sees 2 even if windows is installed to something like a clean drive.
 
It's not so much the dead sectors that are the problem, but windows trying to access them, writing to them, or repairing them. Windows does a lot of stuff in background processes, so that's bound to go wrong and interrupts the OS kernel.
 
olivier renault said:
It's not so much the dead sectors that are the problem, but windows trying to access them, writing to them, or repairing them. Windows does a lot of stuff in background processes, so that's bound to go wrong and interrupts the OS kernel.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I thought it was probably something along those lines. Just wish it was possible to tell which process was actually causing the problem when it happened - could maybe have saved me months of frustration.

Still I guess the moral of the story is never trust the short tests in Seatools even if the drive is only used for storage :). Fortunately it is still perfectly readable so I should be able to copy my stuff off - small mercies :D.
 
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