Occasional random total crash (No BSOD) Hard drive suspected volmgr 46

Hello,

I just added 2x HGST Travelstar 7k1000 to my Dell m6700 in a windows striped dynamic disk (OS RAID 0). One is in the secondary hard drive slot; the other is in an optical drive caddy. I have tried two such caddies. These disks are not used for OS. For that, I use a Samsung 840 pro 256gb SSD.

I am encountering seemingly random total crashes. There can be as much as a week between crashes or as little as a few hours. The active application will stop responding. Switching applications via the task bar causes the task bar to similarly change colors as if it was not responding. CTRL+ALT+DELETE has no effect. I recover by holding the power button for 5 seconds, causing a hard shutdown.

I typically restart my system weekly; other than that, it is either on or in sleep mode.

I currently have my page file disabled (because I have 24gb of RAM), but that has been the case for almost a year and there were no problems until I added these hard drives. Before adding these hard drives, I had a 320GB OEM hard drive that served the same purpose.

Thank you for your assistance

Thanks for the information.

sfc /scannow found no violations.

I had 18 "important" updates waiting to install. I encountered an error, then ran the Update Readiness tool, then updated again. That brought the queue down to 17, which failed with Error 80071A30.

I googled it, ran the appropriate hotfix (Windows Updates won't install. Error code 80071A30), and it still hasn't worked.
I restarted, still noting.
Ran the hotfix again, this time in "aggressive mode"
Restarted
Tried to update again. The update history was cleared. It failed with the same error.

I googled a little more and found this (http://www.tnthelpforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=3160) recommendation to delete C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution . Some people say that's safe, others do not, so I figured I would check back here first.

I have not had the freeze yet (it's only been a few hours), but we will see. The inability to install updates is concerning by itself.

The other thing I have noticed is that some programs that depend on services (VisualSVN Server and Hamachi) need to be "repaired" or uninstalled/reinstalled before they will work with each exit of the application. That might be a separate issue, but I figured it couldn't hurt to mention it.

I have attached a fresh dump. Note that it MAY not include a "freeze" as the aggressive hotfix seems to have cleared some logs.

Okay. I tried individually installing the updates through the built-in Windows update and they all failed with the same error as before.

I tried to get the MSU files for the updates using the instructions provided, but some did not seem to have MSUs available (MS14-040: Description of the security update for an ancillary function driver: July 8, 2014). Perhaps I am just not seeing the link, but I doubt it.

Only One update(Microsoft Security Advisory: Update to improve credentials protection and management: May 13, 2014) had MSU files avaiable. The progress bar filled, then hanged at the end for while. It then failed to install without a specific error message("Some updates were not installed". There was also a MS "fixit" on that page. I ran it, then tried the update again. No success.

I have attached another dump file that should have a crash in it.

I also (after restarting from the crash mentioned above) encountered an issue where the "microsoft windows" process stopped responding. The standard "end non-responsive process" dialog box would pop up whenever I hit a key on the keyboard. Rebooting required holding the power button.

I will try the "clean boot" link you suggested, but it will take quite some time, as sometimes the machine will work for days without incident.

You are correct about the problem being noticed about a week after installing new HDDs and configuring Windows RAID (striping in the windows disk manager). One HDD is in one of the HDD bays, the other is in an optical disk caddy. I have replaced the optical disk caddy to no avail.

To be clear, I am not encountering an actual BSOD. The system becomes totally unresponsive (mouse moves). I am not sure if it will eventually result in a BSOD if left for hours, as I have never tried.

I tried to make this clear in the post title, but apologize if it was not.

I agree that deleting things in the \\Windows folder is not something to do lightly.

The fixes on that page were not successful. The description of the error using the built-in windows update is "Windows Update has encountered an Unknown Error"

I booted the computer with all SATA ports disabled except for my system drive. It still refuses updates (even one at a time) with the "Unknown Error"

I have so far spent a few hours in "clean boot" and have not had the crashing issue, but my system clearly has other problems, which may or may not be related.

Thank you for your continuing help.