Very, very weird problem

Atomik

Atomik

Atomik

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11 Nov 2005
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43
I'm tearing my hair out after hours and hours in front of the PC trying to troubleshoot this problem. Basically, it all began with some corrupt jpegs...

I was working with a bunch of photos on a machine running Vista. I moved these across the LAN to a machine running XP Pro, SP2. Next day, I noticed that some of the appeared corrupt and failed to open. Many of these were also missing their embedded previews.

So far... and this is early days really... I think I've ruled out an HD problem and I think I've ruled out a virus/trojan. I retained copies of the jpegs on the Vista PC and they remain unaffected. Also, only newly-copied jpegs on the XP machine appear to be affected. No older files have this problem, although I've found it replicated in a few recent ones (I should add that I just rebuilt both these systems and the problem has only arisen since that point).

One thing I noticed... and I don't know if I'm barking up the right tree here... is that processor use seems very high on the XP machine. It idles along fine, but then leaps up to extremes as soon as fairly simple tasks are executed. Even browsing can cause 100% usage.

Now what pointed me to this is another weird problem. While trying to replicate the jpeg corruption, I moved a bunch of photo folders to the XP machine and received an error stating "insufficient resources" available to complete the request. No further files could be copied, I could still browse shared resources, but I couldn't remote desktop to the XP machine.

So... I'm wondering if low system resources could have corrupted the jpegs during the copying process? Which brings me to the next question.... why is processor usage so high? I'm really scratching my head on this one, so please shed any light you can.

:confused:
 
How big is your pagefile? Are you using Readyboost? If you are, is the flash drive failing?

Maybe post a screenshot of your taskmanager window on performance tab (if you can)

Burnsy
 
burnsy2023 said:
How big is your pagefile? Are you using Readyboost? If you are, is the flash drive failing?
Click to expand...
It's the XP rig with the processor load, not the Vista rig. The pagefile is at 1.5gig.

Maybe post a screenshot of your taskmanager window on performance tab (if you can)
Click to expand...
At work at the mo, but I don't think it'd be particularly enlightening anyway, TBH.
 
Faulty ram causes file corruption because the files have to go through it before they are transferred.

Run memtest 86 on both machines.

Also I've heard of people having file transfer problems with vista, don't know wether thats related to this problem or not.
 
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OK, this is madness. I just ran some tests. I copied a bunch of pictures over, one at a time and then again as a batch. I did this to the main drive on my XP server and also duplicated the process to a second drive on my XP server. I checked each image and they were all fine and opened with no problems. I've just checked them again and they're all corrupt. As far as I can tell, no other data appears affected (famous last words!). This is beyond weird. Anyone got anything that explains this? I'd swear it was virus-like behaviour, but I'm damned if I can find any sign of infection.
 
Energize said:
Faulty ram causes file corruption because the files have to go through it before they are transferred.

Run memtest 86 on both machines.

Also I've heard of people having file transfer problems with vista, don't know wether thats related to this problem or not.
Click to expand...
I wondered about memory, but no other data appears to be corrupted and I regularly use data from the XP server. Can't rule out a Vista problem, but that doesn't seem to fit with the scenario described in my last post. But then I can't think of any other explanation!
 
burnsy2023 said:
Try what Energize said and run MEMTEST on both machiines

Burnsy
Click to expand...
Yeah, that's next on my list. I can't see how a memory fault should stick a time-bomb in just one file type, but it can't hurt to rule it out.
 
Having probs with memtest. Meanwhile, I've copied the same jpegs to my girlfriend's machine and the same thing's happened. It may be a reboot that triggers it. This means the issue's being cause on the Vista machine somehow, possibly during creation of the files or during transfer. I have two on-board nics, and the transfer to each machine was carried out across a different nic.
 
I'm narrowing this down. I've ruled out memory problems, and I also think the high CPU usage issue was a red herring. To summarise the current situation:

After saving jpegs from CS2, I move the folder across the LAN to a shared folder on an XP Pro machine. When I reboot the XP Pro machine, the jpegs appear corrupt - no embedded preview on some of them and none of them will open. Weirdly, if copy the folder out of the shared directory and onto the desktop of the XP Pro machine, those files appear to remain undamaged. Existing jpegs in the shared directory appear unaffected.

I've duplicated this problem copying files to a 2nd XP Pro machine, so the issue would appear to originate with the Vista box - either during creation of the jpegs or during transfer. I can't see why it only manifests after a reboot of the XP Pro machine though. All the PCs appear to be free from viruses and/or malware. I'm totally puzzled by this one.

One last bit of info - last time I copied a folder of jpegs to the XP Pro machine, I then dragged and copied it to that machines desktop. I noticed after reboot that although both folders contained the same number of files, the folder of corrupted jpegs in the shared directory appeared slightly larger.

Any ideas?
 
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