Computer problems

D

David W. Richardson

Chapelgrove Films
I run a Windows 7 PC (HP H8-1234 6-core, 64-bit) for general PC work and also editing.

This morning I rendered a .WMV of a project I am working on. I played the .WMV using VLC Player. It got about halfway, then suddenly stopped with an error. I wish I'd written that error down, but it may not matter. I did a search for the error and the upshot was possibly a corrupt file. Since it was a .WMV file, I tried playing it in Windows Media Player, but it wouldn't even start.

I tried copying the file to another drive, even my C: drive, but got an error saying that the destination drive was unreachable. That seemed odd, since I could copy FROM the C: drive without a problem. I chalked that up to a mistake in the error message. I felt pretty sure, from my searches on the web, that my data drive -- a separate internal SATA drive -- was failing. I couldn't even run CHKDSK on it, although Windows Explorer still saw everything on it at that time.

I decided to shut down and disconnect the drive, which I did. That left me with the C: drive and another internal SATA data drive. Both my data drives, BTW, are 2TB. I decided to connect the power and data cables from the drive I'd taken out to the remaining internal data drive, just to see if maybe cables were a problem. Booted up and all was fine.

I shut down again and re-connected the failing SATA drive, then tried to boot up again -- and it wouldn't boot at all! I got a DOS message that said "NTLDR is missing." Shut down, disconnected the drive, and it booted up.

But now Windows is beginning to behave strangely. I went copied a file from my C: drive to my remaining internal data drive (F) to make sure that worked, and it did. But I noticed when I exited the folder on F: that I put the file in, and went back to the root of F: (in Explorer), the folder icon had disappeared! I could still click on the space where the icon was supposed to be, but no icon. And whenever I clicked on any other folder on F:, the same thing happened. I didn't try it on the folders in the C: drive because now I was spooked!

I shut down again. Let it sit a few minutes. Booted back up. This time I logged into a different user account, one that doesn't have Admin privileges. Just in case. So far everything works as it should, but now I'm wondering what's going on.

I do remember the initial error message in VLC when I tried to re-play the file - by doing a "File > Open" from within VLC - said that the drive was marked as "RAW". That can't be good. I updated VLC, but that changed nothing.

So now I don't know if my data drive is the culprit, or if there's something going wrong with Windows. I don't have an external hard drive enclosure, so I can't hook my data drive up to another computer and see if it works there.

No new hardware or software, no changes to the system. I looked, but there is no restore point. I could swear I set one up a few weeks ago, but Windows says no. I run antivirus and anti-spyware programs. I did make a repair disk, but I hope it doesn't come to that.

I'm at a loss. Any suggestions?
 
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More info...

First, I told you wrong. I only have 2 physical drives. Both are SATA 2TB. One is my primary drive, which has multiple partitions (C: is one of them.) One of those partitions is used for logical drive F:, where I keep the libraries -- My Documents, My Pictures, etc.

The other SATA drive is a 2TB SATA physical drive. That's the drive on which all of my video editing projects are kept. I should have been religiously backing them up, but I haven't -- so please, hold the chastisement. I am painfully aware.

When I first boot up, that data drive is available. But within a minute or two, it goes offline.
 
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I have tried connecting the drive's power cable to a different port on the motherboard, but same problem.

When the drive dies, eventually I get a popup from AMD RAIDXpert that says 'Array Offline'. I didn't know I was running a RAID array. I just have two drives connected with the only cables available inside the HP H8-1234.
 
Crisis averted!

Apparently the whole problem was some kind of corruption of that rendered .WMV file. I deleted it, and the hard drive works fine now. I just finished backing up that whole project to another drive. No idea how file corruption could cause Windows to think the entire drive was offline, but computers are weird sometimes.

Breathing a huge sigh of relief! And buying another backup drive. :-)
 
David W. Richardson said:
Crisis averted!

Apparently the whole problem was some kind of corruption of that rendered .WMV file. I deleted it, and the hard drive works fine now. I just finished backing up that whole project to another drive. No idea how file corruption could cause Windows to think the entire drive was offline, but computers are weird sometimes.

Breathing a huge sigh of relief! And buying another backup drive. :-)
Click to expand...

If the process of writing data of the file, a corrupted block on the disk drive was encountered, perhaps if the Windows 'wonder wear' was checking the file, it encountered the corruption and attempted to 'correct' the problem, it may have caused the system to hickup, depending on where the corruption was... like in the file system directory structure.

So, backup, and probably retire the drive. I don't know what windows has in the way of mounting a disk drive 'read only' but if there is some way to do that, do so. Then backup the drive.
 
About a year ago, one of my Linux servers started acting up. It would lock up solid, or reboot itself unexpectedly, or otherwise well behaved applications would suddenly start consuming 100% CPU time. SMART and fsck (the UNIX equivalent of CHKDSK) reported no problems on the 1 TB Western Digital system disk. The only thing that even hinted at disk problems was that sometimes the drive access light would stay on solid for extended periods of time while it was being cranky. I stripped that system down to the bare bones, checked out every piece of it. Replaced the video card, RAM and power supply. Tested all cables and connectors and replaced a few, including the SATA cable on that drive. I finally changed out the drive because I had nothing else left to check. The problems went away immediately.

Later, I opened up the disk drive on the workbench. There was a huge circular gouge about 1/8" wide in a perfect circle about halfway out on the top platter surface. Fine dust that had once been the platter and its metal plating covered the whole interior of the drive. It had obviously suffered a horrendous head crash at some point, but the OS and the testing programs didn't pick up on it at all.

So, although you can usually trust CHKDSK and the like to at least point you in the direction of a drive failure, they can demonstrably be fooled. Given my experience, I would now try replacing the disk first and not last in the troubleshooting process. And I wouldn't trust yours for any important work again. (Is anything we store really unimportant?)

- Greg
 
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How on earth could FSCK not see bad sectors on a drive whose platter had a 1/8" wide gouge all the way around it??? That would make me worry about the effectiveness of FSCK.

My drive's not exhibiting any behavior similar to what you're describing. I'm going to get another drive and back all the data up to it. A 3TB 7200-rpm SATA drive can be had for $100 or less. But unless this drive begins behaving oddly again, I will probably continue to use it. I really think it was just a corrupted file -- although I do wonder what caused the corrupting in the first place.

Thanks!
 
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David W. Richardson said:
How on earth could FSCK not see bad sectors on a drive whose platter had a 1/8" wide gouge all the way around it??? That would make me worry about the effectiveness of FSCK.

My drive's not exhibiting any behavior similar to what you're describing. I'm going to get another drive and back all the data up to it. A 3TB 7200-rpm SATA drive can be had for $100 or less. But unless this drive begins behaving oddly again, I will probably continue to use it. I really think it was just a corrupted file -- although I do wonder what caused the corrupting in the first place.

Thanks!
Click to expand...

If you are using a unix/linux like OS, I've found that using the following command will diagnose 'bad sector' issues. fsck and I will presume "CHKDSK" (haven't used Windows in a very long time in terms of problems...), these tools will check 'the file structure' blocks, not the 'data contents'. Also, a file could have an error which is corrected for now with multiple reads, which fsck/CHKDSK may recover from and give an 'all is well' indication. I have had to use the Mac OS DiskUtility to determine some mac issues, and there is a sector read option as I recall...

In any case:

dd if=/dev/sdxx of=/dev/null bs=16M

Some of the options have variations but that's the basic idea to read the entire disk ignoring the actual data, but 'listen' for head recalibration or any 'tick' sound that is not a rthmic sound of the head moving from track to track.

This of course would not be the case for solid state devices... but then... using 'dmesg' on Linux may give 'sector/block read' failure indications...

That would test the 'media'... on the other hand if the problem was a 'seek' error, like the control to the head is going out... a 'randomized' access program would perhaps show that sort of problem... Don't know what tool that would be... I'd probably write my own at that point...
 
Well everything's been fine until today.

Again, I rendered out from Vegas Studio HD 11 to .MP4 file. Render went fine. Played the video a couple of times. Even uploaded it to Vimeo. Went back, made some changes in the project, and rendered out another .MP4. No problems.

That was hours ago. The computer has been sitting here unused while I worked on something else for about an hour. Came back, got back on the PC, and immediately got a RAIDXpert message telling me the drive was offline. Had to reboot to get it back.

Right now I'm copying that whole project to another drive -- an external (USB) hard drive. Hopefully that will complete without a problem.

I'm wondering if it might help to update drivers, but I'm not sure if there's a RAIDXpert driver or what. Guess that will take some research.

I'm seriously hoping the drive isn't dying on me. But if it is, I will be prepared. It's just strange that it's worked fine for the last 5-6 days.

I'm wondering if maybe the PC itself is overheating. It's tucked in a pretty small compartment in my desk, but it's been in that same spot for months and months. May have to look into that too.

It's always something....
 
FWIW, I use an HP H8-1234 with a 6-core AMD FX-6120 processor (3.5 GHz) and 16GB of PC3-10600 RAM. Windows 7, 64-bit.

Primary disk is a 7200 rpm 2TB SATA drive. It's partitioned -- 1 TB for C:, the normal recovery partition as drive Z, and a 1 TB data partition as drive F. The second internal drive is 7200 rpm 2 TB SATA, a single partition, as drive D. That's the one that keeps failing on me.

Free space is 112 GB on C, 184 GB on D (the problem drive), and 86 GB on drive F, which is mainly used for the libraries (Documents, Pictures, etc.) and archiving of some video projects.

The copy of my current project from the problem drive to the external HD has completed successfully, so that's good. It may be worth noting that when the drive has failed, I was logged in as Administrator -- currently, and during the copy, I am logged in as a User, with typical User permissions. Don't know how that could make any difference, though.
 
One other thing...

Both times this drive failed, I was working on the same Vegas project, rendering out a 720p version of a 7-minute video. No errors during the renders. Maybe it's just a coincidence. Or maybe not.

The first time, I deleted the rendered video and the drive didn't fail after that. Again, maybe coincidence.
 
What confuses me is that RAIDXpert seems to be for the purpose of combining multiple drives into one single drive (as seen by Windows). But my drives have always been separate. If they were in a RAID array, I certainly never knew it. What's up with that?
 
Here are the events recorded in the RAIDXpert log when the error occurred:

1 AMD Chipset SATA Controller - Controller 1 Error 2015/12/16 16:13:25 Logical drive "RAID READY" goes offline
2 AMD Chipset SATA Controller - Controller 1 Error 2015/12/16 16:13:25 Disk (Port Number 4,Target ID 1) Setdown
3 AMD Chipset SATA Controller - Controller 1 Information 2015/12/16 16:13:25 BSL accessed on disk (Port Number 4,Target ID 1) at LBA 0x07c7650a8
4 AMD Chipset SATA Controller - Controller 1 Information 2015/12/16 16:13:25 BSL update on disk (Port Number 4,Target ID 1) at LBA 0x07c7650a8
5 AMD Chipset SATA Controller - Controller 1 Warning 2015/12/16 16:13:25 Task 20 disk error on disk (Port Number 4,Target ID 1) at LBA 0x07c7650a8 (Length 0x100) with status 20; Error register: 0
 
I just closed Vegas and it crashed. Here is the error info:

Problem Description
Application Name: Vegas Movie Studio HD
Application Version: Version 11.0 (Build 75)
Problem: Unmanaged Exception (0xc0000005)
Fault Module: C:\Windows\SysWOW64\ntdll.dll
Fault Address: 0x77BE43D0
Fault Offset: 0x000343D0

Fault Process Details
Process Path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Sony\Vegas Movie Studio HD 11.0\VegasMovieStudioHD110.exe
Process Version: Version 11.0 (Build 75)
Process Description: Vegas Movie Studio HD
Process Image Date: 2012-04-13 (Fri Apr 13) 18:10:50

Extra Information
File: C:\Users\David\AppData\Local\Sony\Vegas Movie Studio HD\11.0\dx_video_grovel_x86.log
File: C:\Users\David\AppData\Local\Sony\Vegas Movie Studio HD\11.0\svfx_video_grovel_x86.log
File: C:\Users\David\AppData\Local\Sony\Vegas Movie Studio HD\11.0\dx_grovel_x86.log
File: D:\ASF Trailer\asf trailer - drake.vf
 
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