Bad Custers re-appearing

[jade1001]

Fellow Geeks,

I have this machine that is my sister's that has some issues. It had problems with freezing up and such. I just formatted it and installed Windows 2000 Professional.

After installing the OS, Ultra controller driver, and whatever driver's Windows installs during the setup process, and I decided to run check disk again. And it reported a-half dozen bad clusters. All were located in the general location of c:\winnt\system32:

A disk check has been scheduled.
Windows will now check the disk.
Cleaning up minor inconsistencies on the drive.
Cleaning up 3 unused index entries from index $SII of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 3 unused index entries from index $SDH of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 3 unused security descriptors.
CHKDSK is verifying file data (stage 4 of 5)...
Windows replaced bad clusters in file 4657
of name \WINNT\system32\dllcache\scrrun.dll.
Windows replaced bad clusters in file 5668
of name \WINNT\system32\dllcache\msvfw32.dll.
Windows replaced bad clusters in file 5805
of name \WINNT\system32\dllcache\ntvdm.exe.
Windows replaced bad clusters in file 6257
of name \WINNT\system32\dllcache\winsmon.dll.
File data verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying free space (stage 5 of 5)...
Free space verification is complete.
CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in the volume bitmap.
Windows has made corrections to the file system.

So I let it go ahead and fix it and I decided to run check disk again and no bad clusters were reported. So I go ahead and do the necessary updates, security setting tweaks, and hot fixes. Run check disk again and guess what. Bad Clusters came back!!!

A disk check has been scheduled.
Windows will now check the disk.
Cleaning up minor inconsistencies on the drive.
Cleaning up 10 unused index entries from index $SII of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 10 unused index entries from index $SDH of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 10 unused security descriptors.
CHKDSK is verifying file data (stage 4 of 5)...
Windows replaced bad clusters in file 5319
of name \WINNT\system32\dllcache\ipnathlp.dll.
Windows replaced bad clusters in file 6827
of name \WINNT\system32\dllcache\vgx.dll.
Windows replaced bad clusters in file 7052
of name \WINNT\$NTSER~1\ntbackup.exe.
Windows replaced bad clusters in file 7355
of name \WINNT\$NTSER~1\odbcjt32.dll.
Windows replaced bad clusters in file 7529
of name \WINNT\$NTSER~1\dao360.dll.
File data verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying free space (stage 5 of 5)...
Free space verification is complete.
CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in the volume bitmap.
Windows has made corrections to the file system.

I go ahead and let if fix those too. Run check disk again and all is clean again.

These bad clusters are going to keep re-appearing. I have not found the source yet. I suppose that is part of my problem. To be safe, instead of installing office and such from the CD-ROM drive on her computer, I did it over my network sharing my drive.

My problem is that my sister wouldn't run check disk on her computer once day. She doesn't know. And if I showed her, she'd forget after going to sleep at night. She seems to delete everything she learns for the day after going to sleep at night. So these bad clusters would just snowball up until the system becomes completely unstable. Which is exactly what had happened before this last format.

The weird part is there are no bad sectors on this disk. The speed and performance of it is good.

So I decided to mount another hard disk, a completely different physical drive. And guess what. Bad Clusters there too! It is a brand new drive straight out of the ESD baggie! So I have concluded it is probably not her hard disk, especially since they are in the same general location, c:\winnt\system32.

Below are her system specs:

Mobo:
Asus AMD Socket A, A7V, Athlon & Duron CPUs VIA KT133, AGPset with ATA100, PCI133/VC133 7USB Ports Upgradable
Processor:
AMD Athlon Processor 1GHz 256K T-Bird
Memory:
256Megs pc 133
Cards:
Asus V7100 GeForce2 MX 32MB AGP (Video)
Creative Sound Blaster PCI128 (Audio)
SMC 1211 TX (NIC)

This part may be relevant:
IDE1:
Master--> Western Digital Caviar, 7200RPM, 20GB
Slave --> Iomega Zip Drive 250 (I know this slows everything down)
IDE2:
Master --> Sony 10x4x32 CD-RW
Slave --> Toshiba 4x DVD CD-RW

If anybody has any ideas, I am all ears.

Thanks,

jade>:O>

 

[Jakespeare]

Strange. Here is what I would do:
1st) Take the 1st HD, and get the factory Diagnosis software from their website. (Since you already took it out of the system, no need to save data, right ?) Don't just run the rudimentary "quick test," run the entire test.
From what I know, the MS software tests are just not that reliable, Especailly compared to what the Manufacturers have for dianostic software programs. The full test will test the data integrity of that HD; if it is good, I would then run the Zero fill, or zero it out, and make it virgin-like again.
Then, if you do not want to reinstall from scratch, I would Ghost your OS from the Sister's computer, which is now on the New WD 7200 20 Gig back onto it (to save the several hours time necessary to set it up), and install it in Sisters computer again. From my perspective, this would be a good test of both the hard drive (if it was good after the full tests) and how it operates in the Sister's computer.
Then, you have your test platform: Clean and tested hard drive, in the problematic computer. ( The only problem I see is if there was really some corrupted data on the WD 7200 20 Gig that is in there now).

******* OH> I just had a thought: What if any partitioning tool are you using ? Are you using something like "Partition Magic," and not FDISK ? I believe all those tools are less robust than the old slow FDISK, and can cause problems. Sure, I suggested Ghost, and it falls in that category, but only to save time. I know it would be MUCH better to just use FDISK and set up Win2K again fresh.

Back to the Sister's computer, and testing. After putting back the hard drive that was tested with the Factory diagnostic s/w, just run it. If bad sectors start reappearing,,,,,,,,, then, uh, darn.
This is where the collective wisdom of this community can come up with some answers, or at least some good theories.
Unless you Sister is totally abusing this computer, like shutting it by the power switch, moving the computer when it's running, and physically damaging the drive, I have not heard of a system that destroys hard drives like this.
I would like to know if this is a rare computer glitch,
or just bad luck and getting 2 bad hard drives in a row.

 

[ngagne]

You might want to try a low-level format by writing all 1s to the disk. You can do this with the WD diagnostic tools. Nate Gagne
ngagne@numa-inc.com

Like my post? Let me know it was helpful!

 

[smitee]

jade1001

Not into hardware but remembered seeing this while searching for something else...Items 2-3-4 came after surfing a bit.

[1]Apparently Windows2000 doesn't support ATA 100
Support for ATA 100 (Mode 5 ) in Windows 2000

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q260/2/33.ASP

[2]XP related but might help..
ATA/ATAPI;
idetest.log

http://www.microsoft.com/hwtest/search/details.asp?Type=Errata&ID=481

[3]Here's a thread you might be interested in..
Subject: western digital caviar 8.4 and no ata 100 (help)

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=...l=en&rnum=11&selm=3A69C645.941C86DE%40att.net

[4]Some help here..
Ultra ATA/100 Faq

http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/ultra_ata100.html

Smitee

 

[jade1001]

Jakespeare,

I took her 20 Gig Western Digital Drive and mounted it on my brother’s AMD machine for fun last night and we installed Windows 2000 on it. Did a fresh install, nuked all the partitions and such. Brother’s machine reported no bad clusters after running check disk right after windows setup. We did the same thing with the other drive (the 10 Gig Western Digital) we mounted as a test after we found bad clusters on the first 20 Gig drive which had came up with bad clusters on my sister’s machine. It too came up clean on my brother’s computer. My brother is running an AMD processor based machine with Windows 2000 but is slower than my sister’s.

When we setup the computer, we just used Windows 2000 professional straight. We did load the Ultra controller drivers (even though she is not using them) and did a fresh install of windows. After Windows completed setup we decided to run check disk. We did nothing else. No partition magic, no nothing, just straight Windows 2000 professional. My sister would be lost with a dual boot.

My sister did have a psycho power supply, now that you mention it. The thing would make her computer startup on it’s own and shut down on its own. It freaked out some A+ certified techs. They looked at it and said, “Poltergeist – the thing is possessed.” They replaced it and said all was fine. Apparently not

I would have to agree with the MS tools not being reliable. I will try your suggestion about downloading a low-level format utility and resetting all the zero’s and one’s on her disk platter to zeros.


Ngagne,

I will download a Western Digital low-level format tool from their URL.

Smitee,

Very interesting, I learn something new everyday in this place. I will check this out.


Jakespeare, Ngane, & Smitee:

Thank you everybody for your very helpful comments and suggestions. I will take all under consideration.

I will post my findings.

Thank you very much- your help is greatly appreciated,

jade>:O>

 

[jade1001]

Fellow Geeks,

I've got some more stuff to add to this wonderful problem.

I've ruled out the hard drive. I’ve also replaced her 80 conductor IDE cables. So now I'm down to the primary IDE controller, the mobo, the processor, memory, the secondary IDE controller, and the secondary devices.

I did a fresh install of Windows 2000 Professional. After it completed setup and it only had the barebones minimum installed (no third party software except the ultra controller driver), I ran check disk and the usual bad clusters came up.

Next, on the original drive, I installed via chipset updates, Windows 2000 updates, security updates, service pack 2, drivers, and the whole works re-installed. Ran check disk and of course the usual bad clusters came up.

Then, I decided to quit loading things from the CD-ROM. Instead, I decided to share an entire drive on my own computer full of her applications. I've decided to install everything via the network. The bad clusters did not come up after installing all of her applications.

So for fun, I decided to throw on some games, which I have on CD to see if those would create some bad clusters to try to rule out the CD-ROM drive. I installed Quake III Arena, Aliens vs. Predator, Star Trek Elite Forces, Mech Warrior 4, and Giants Citizen Kabuto. <-- My sister is going to love this. Ran check disk and no bad clusters came up.

So I'm back to square one.

I decided to browse the web on her computer and went to the tombraider movie website and it hard froze there. Couldn’t Control+Alt+Delete out. There is a lot of flash player stuff going on there but she has that installed. This is what caused us to format from the get go. She complained about it hard freezing all the time on certain websites causing her to hit the reset button. I had to hit the reset button.

After rebooting I went to the event log and I found a message there about the possibility of a mal-functioned network adapter. Also, upon trying to re-open her browser it BSoD'd. I didn't get a chance to look at the hex code but I went to the event log and found it was the 0xD1 BSOD. (DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL) This is probably completely unrelated to the bad cluster issue. I’m assuming the internal request level not less or equal means the driver should be sitting on an internal request level equal or less than what it is sitting on now therefore causing it to access memory outside of what it is allowed to touch making Windows crash. I’ll try to talk my sister into ditching her SMC 1211 TX for a 3Com.

I checked out her IDE controllers in the device manager and found that only one device was on ultra DMA mode, the Sony Burner. I tried to get the others to go there but they won't. They insist on staying on PIO. I don't know if this would cause the data to get corrupted.

If anybody has any suggestions or advice for me to try, I’m all ears.

Thanks,
jade>:O>

 

[Jakespeare]

Jade,
I think you have something here with the IDE settings.

I have not seen any list of hardware; all I know is that you have a VIA chipset based mainboard (MB).

Issues: Why is it not running ATA/100 ?
> The issue is the age of the mainboard here, which I don't know.

I really can't contribute anything here based on what I know, except for a few minor things, (which I will list).

> BIOS: It should be updated with the latest BIOS.
> VIA 4in1 - should be the latest update (4.34 last time I checked, it is really new, just out for XP - about 10/11/01)
>
* I'm not familiar enough with Win2K to be a valuable contributor on OS issues here. I do hardware, I build computers. I use Windows 98, and now XP.

> Therefore, my input will be limited to what I know, about the hardware issues.

* Last: If the BIOS is updated to the latest version, the settings in the BIOS should be carefully examined.
PIO4 setting is very strange. BIOS should be on AUTO for the DMA settings.

> That is all. Will wait for an update.

Jake

 

[jade1001]

Jake,

She has the latest 4.35 via 4in1 update. She has an ASUS motherboard. I don't have that machine here on my bench anymore to look at and she lost her user manual I do remember that she doesn't have a 686B chipset. She has 686A, in case that is what you are looking for there. She came and got her computer cause she has to get her work done. She's got some projects due that require the use of a computer. My brother has the same motherboard though. He doesn't have this problem.

Everything in the device manager looks clean. No exclamation points or anything of that sort.

We are going to work on ditching her current network card and putting in a new one since the event log is full of errors in reference to that card.

Thanks for you help,

jade>:O>