Solved BC f4 error when heavily using my new HDD

[tritous]

Hello,

I recently bought at last a larger HDD, with the aim of replacing my old 250GB with a 3TB for my data, keeping my system, apps and docs on my 500GB. Currently as I've not yet transferred my 250GB disk across I've got 3 discs in my system.

The problem is when I try and copy my data across I get after a while source not found errors, soon followed by a system crash. the system, on the following reboot then comes up with terrifying message of "No Operating System Found". The reboot after it boots up correctly, with windows confirming if you want to use safe mode or not, etc. While I'm generally very familiar with computers and their architecture, I admit I know a lot less about hard drives and drivers compared to CPU and memory architectures. I'm surprised that this is causing problems with both my 250GB disk and with my system disk, unless it is related to the IO bus itself. All in all I need someone more experience in this corner to help me figure it out.

The error is as follows:

Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: BlueScreen
OS Version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.256.1
Locale ID: 2057

Additional information about the problem:
BCCode: f4
BCP1: 0000000000000003
BCP2: FFFFFA8008423060
BCP3: FFFFFA8008423340
BCP4: FFFFF800031C85F0
OS Version: 6_1_7601
Service Pack: 1_0
Product: 256_1

I've also attached the minidump.

Sys details as follows:
OS: W7 Ultimate x64 Service Pack 1 (and usual updates)
Mobo: ASUS P5Q3 Duluxe dual onboard WiFi
Bios: 2105 (26 April 2009)
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9400
RAM: 8GB Corsair something (it's compatible and has worked for 1.5 years), DDR3 1333
GFX: Sapphire HD4870 Toxic 1GB
PSU: SilverStone Strider Gold 1000W (note: also brand new and changed recently)
SATA1: Western Digital WD5001ABYS
SATA2: Maxtor 6L250S0
SATA3: Seagate Barracuda ST3000DM001 (Brand new, suspected)
SATA4: DVD drive (Previously SATA 3)
SATA5: DVD drive (Previously SATA 4)

I can provide Channel / Location / partitioning info if needed

Things I also think are of relevance:

- My cooling (I've seen this error related to many things, overheat included.

I recently migrated my pc to a new case. my pair of 120mm fans (front inlet, rear exhaust) upgraded to a pair of 200mm (front inlet, top exhaust) and I've cleaned my pc and upgrade my CPU heatsink. Everything seems ice cold, but I was concerned that there is now less cooling around my HDDs, an there are 3 rather than 2 with a gap between. It is possible that the new airflow pattern is not as optimal for the chipset and bridge cooling, although with the huge heatsinks they have I wouldnt be concerned about that. Still, a 90gb single transfer between 2 disks is hell of a load.

- Timeline

I have gotten this error on 3 occasions: once the day I bought the disk, and twice in the last day (I stopped to wait for my second case fan to arrive in case it was a heat issue). The changes to my system when I first got the disk were a new PSU, new case (different cooling), and the new disk. As part of this my dvd drives moved SATA port, I also hooked up my new e-sata port on the case, although I don't have any external disks. The changes yesterday were the fitting of the front case fan in front of the hard drives and a new CPU heatsink and fan. There were 2 weeks between these events and these are the only two times I have attempted the copy of data to the new disk. The first two times I tried the whole block, the last time this morning I only tried to copy 1 folder of 10gb.

- Event logs

Searching deeper into my system logs I see a around 15 disk errors for each event reporting bad blocks. However, the old disk has never had problems in the past. Along with this are a lot of ATA api controller errors, and a "bugcheck" error which initiated the blue screen. An example of each is attached. Doesn't look pretty.

- Bios

Yes my Bios is old. I find something quite terrifying about a Bios flash and have always held the policy of NEVER update the bios if it is working at the moment. However, when checking the hardware monitors for my new cpu fan (which was so quiet i thought it wasn't working) I noticed the new disk appears in Bios as 856GB. I also hold the policy of if the Bios isn't working upgrade / downgrade as necessary, and if this is related I will go hunt a stable version down.

closing

Any light shed on this will be welcomed. What puzzles me most is the randomness of it. I have had no problems with formatting or deleting data from the new drive, only when copying large amounts of data to it. It is a large margin bigger than my other disks, it's packed in with other disks, the bios is old and I do plan to hammer it. I suspect it's less of a nuclear disaster than the event logs show but it's quite clear the system isn't too happy about it and I want to fix it.

Thanks in Advance
K.Barad

PS: on a lighter note when joining it asked as a confirmation "how many hours are there in a day". I put 24, but today definitely feels like 30+!

 

[tritous]

Still awaiting help on this. I do have a little new news though. I just had a pair of crashes (instant power off, no error messages) from normal disk use of the 250GB disk, and as a test I just successfully copied 50GB from my 500GB main disk to the new 3TB disk without an issue. I now can't deny the possibility that the 250GB disk is actually the one on its way to death (Luckily the stuff I want to copy across is because it saves me weeks of redownloading on a slow connection...nothing there is hard to replace).

 

[F5ing]

Welcome! Put some thought into that signature, huh? Pretty amusing, I must say!!

As you've got your data secured (although only within the case), you can start by testing that 250GB disk via the system's BIOS. Reboot, get into the BIOS, and see what options you have in there for testing your hard drives.

For a more definitive test, download SeaTools | Seagate and run full tests with it.

There are also issues with drives larger than 2GB, and maybe you've already taken them in to account as there a a number of stories on this. Check this link for starters:

Everything You Need to Know About 3TB Hard Drives | PCWorld

 

[tritous]

Cheers for that, but I have no tools within my bios for disk analysis. I had a feeling I needed to get myself a disk analyser but as I've not had a HDD problem since 2001 I couldn't remember any.

I'm quite worried at the moment about my 250GB Maxtor. Overnight I ran a checkdisk (I've been doing lots of diagnosis while waiting for an answer) and found some bad sectors. In response I've removed the system paging and temp folder from there and onto my 3TB, no problems from that it seems, and no problems backing up 200gb of data onto the new drive from my 500GB...it's only copying from the 250GB that has failed.

I can think that the bad sectors I found were in files I've not used for a very long time...except to copy them to the new drive. Is it possible that this is the change that led to this error appearing...rather than the hardware change? If so I'd put more and more suspicions on my old drive.

 

[tritous]

First bit of interesting news from SeaTools: my 250GB fails the short DST very quickly, and it's "power on hours" is logged at just over 50,000 hours compared to the 20,000 and 250 hours of my other disks. I had forgotten this disk was pushing 9 years old now, I should have expected something

And yes, the sig is true. It's actually why I changed the psu: because the old one was starting to show the effect of the beating, and the case to a case with a bit of better armouring.

 

[karlsnooks]

tritous,

Does you bios correctly handle a 3 TB disk?

I recommend visiting the website of your mobo mfg.

I also recommend reading:
Everything You Need to Know About 3TB Hard Drives | PCWorld

 

[karlsnooks]

Be sure to check for a bios update for your mobo.

 

[karlsnooks]

One solution which worked for another person is partition the 3 TB into 2 TB and 1 TB.

 

[F5ing]

If that 250GB drive has any more data on it that you want, I wouldn't run chkdsk on it again until verifying there are no physical problems with it. From my experience, chkdsk does work well under normal circumstances, but if there are physical/electronic problems with a drive, it can absolutely mangle the data on there.

Unless you had unsaved data on the PC that you needed to recover, there is no need to worry about the pagefile. The temp folder, of course, is your choice, especially if you ever saved files there yourself.

I wouldn't think this has anything to do with installing another hard disk. It might simply be that it's that HD's time to fail (how old is it/how has it been handled, etc.). I would download Seatools and check that disk out.

 

[F5ing]

Wow! Four posts since I started composing my previous one!!!

 

[karlsnooks]

tritous,

Don't worry. Chkdsk is not going to mangle anything. True is that if the hard disk is going south then any use of the disk can be the last.

What I do recommend is that you immediately copy any data dear to your heart from that disk to a USB drive or USB stick or even to your new hard dirve.

After you have the data copied over, then definitely run:
CHKDSK C: /R
here I've used C: where you will want to use the appropriate drive letter.
The /R is going to check the entire disk, even where you don't have data and is going to mark any bad sectors as bad so that the drive does not try to use those sectors.

In the old days, we had to specify both /F and /R but now /R includes /F.

 

[tritous]

It's set up as a single partition, windows handles it correctly as a primary, although the fact that I'm only using it as an auxiliary simplifies things a little. The Bios I'm unsure about, it shows it in the BIOS as 860GB, but windows instantly saw it for the real size. It would seem there are no newer BIOS versions available anyway, actually there were only ever a handful of them for this Mobo anyway, it's been very stable in firmware as well as as hardware.

I've managed to copy 90% of the data from my 250GB onto the new drive, avoiding the bits in bad sectors, page files on the new drive work, temp files do, and i've migrated a few things from my 500gb across too. everything I wanted to migrate to the new disk is on there as well as backed up where it originally was. It's just a case of trying to confirm if these errors and instabilities have been because of the new disk, the old disk, or something else completely. I don't want to complete the migration until I know I can trust things again. The plan was to move everything from my 250gb to the new disk, some of the heavier items from my other drives too, and use the new disk as my main data storage and scrap my old 250gb. In the future I may well get a 50-80gb SSD for system and paging, use my 500gb just as a backup and primarily operate off my 3tb, but again this needs me to be able to trust in the new drive.

 

[karlsnooks]

tritous,
Is your 500 GB drive good?

If yes, then move everything over there and then create three 1 TB partitions on the 3 TB drive.

Did you read that link I provided? You will find the info there rather instructive for your situation.

 

[tritous]

I'm tired of small partitions. The main reason for getting the big disk is that I made the mistake of partitioning my 500gb into a nicely organised 4 partitions: system, apps, data, games at 30, 30, 200, 240, only to end up with completely disproportionate growth at 29.8, 10, 70, 240 used. my 250 gb hd became the spillover to deal with steam being a git, and I wanted to have a less limiting partitioning of just 100gb for sys and apps, a few terra for data and games, and a backup: primarily for data since everything else is recoverable.

I did run the boot time checkdisk yesterday, it managed to tell me which were the corrupted files and I've recovered the rest saving me some weeks of redownloading data: replaceable doesn't mean easily replaceable. The tools from seagate suggest that my other two drives have no problems. Sadly while it supports a "fix errors" option on the other two which have no errors, no such function is offered for my 250gb disk which does.

It's clearer now that my 250gb disk is dying and there is likely no way to fix it, luckily at a convenient time when i have a new disk to replace it. My important data is now on both my 500gb and my 3tb, and regardless I want to get rid of the ancient disk; it's served me well for 50,000 hours; I am actually impressed it lasted for such a long time.

What I need to know now is are ALL my problems traceable to trying to read data from a dying disk, or is there a chance that there is a second issue lurking around too? I don't have the tools to analyse the minidumps or the experience in HDD failures to identify the repercussions, only enough to analyse there is a definite issue.

After this is solved I think I'll have to lurk these forums a while and help a few people in return, it's only fair afterall.

 

[karlsnooks]

tritous,

[B]What I need to know now is are ALL my problems traceable to trying to  read data from a dying disk, or is there a chance that there is a  second issue lurking around too?[/B]

now think about it. How can anyone really, honestly answer that question?

Let me suggest seeing if any problems remain after you have dumped the old 250 GB disk.

If any problems show up, then we will go after them.

After dumping the old disk, then you might want to clean all events out of the event logs so that one has a clean slate.
View attachment Clear Event Logs Using a Batch File.zip

View attachment Clear Event Logs Using PowerShell.zip

Take your pick. I use the PowerShell approach but the batch file approach is simpler for most.

 

[tritous]

A fair enough point. I suppose that either way if I know the old disk has problems then there will only be a benefit to removing it at this point. It's easy enough for me to clear my logs manually, I've always preferred the manual approach to things anyway: I like to keep my mind up to date with my PC.

I'll get out the screwdrivers in a bit and take out the disk, with my data backed up between the other two there is a bit more margin anyway if there are other issues.

 

[karlsnooks]

tritous,
I suggest you take a look at either one of those event log cleaners. You will find that it is possible to view the names of the logs that are cleared. You will also realize that you would spend many, many minutes clearing all of those logs manually.

 

[tritous]

nah, it took me around 30 seconds. its only a couple clicks per log and there are only 6-7 different event logs to go through.

 

[F5ing]

I think he may have been referring to all the other logs that get recorded.

Just curious, did you ever notice any SMART notifications for the 250GB drive when you booted the machine?

 

[tritous]

My machine has always been stable and I keep it fairly light of unnecessary utilities so I'm not packed full of logs. What I am packed full of is the downloads for the automatic updates, but that's a different fight.

no notifications, and the SMART test passed with the SeaTools too. That said this machine has always been so fast booting you need a videocam and a frame by frame view to see half the information. I'm about to shutdown and pull the drive out now anyway, and I'll do another general bios checkover then