Defrag screw up or bad HD?

M

MrMonty

Weaksauce
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Joined
Dec 3, 2004
Messages
101
Athlon 2500+
Western Digital 160gig HD, PATA
Win2k w/ sp4, NTFS
Thermaltake 420W PSU

Some of my most recent digital pictures, that I'd looked at before, all of sudden the files were filled with the letter P and nothing else. Strange, I chalked it up to some weird corruption occuring, ran check disk and everything seemed fine. Not sure if it was related but it seems like it was a precursor to what happened later.
Couple weeks later, I analyzed the hard disk and I've got 26% fragmentation so I decide to defrag. Afterwards, the computer can't find the windows boot loader. I reinstall win2k and it boots up fine. I start looking at pictures, zip files, camcorder captures, and 50%-80% of the files are corrupt. I look at them with a hex editor and I see fragments of other file. Almost like the hard drive defragged but the FAT wasn't updated or something?

So, anybody have something like this happen doing a defrag? Is this hard drive bad news and I'm courting with disaster? Can someone point me to a good HD stress test program?

Thanks,
Monty
 
Whoah... all the pics were filled with the letter P? I'd be interested to see that.
 
If your drive is already bad, and you defrag it, yes it will make things worse, because defrag moves all your files around, and if the drive is writing bad data, all the moved files get damaged.

==>Lazn
 
Lazn_Work said:
If your drive is already bad, and you defrag it, yes it will make things worse, because defrag moves all your files around, and if the drive is writing bad data, all the moved files get damaged.

==>Lazn
Click to expand...

Yeah, that was my guess. I downloaded the Western Digital diagnostic tools and will test it tonight, hopefully that will tell me something more.

#$%&!!! I just checked and I bought the thing on 2/14/2004. That's almost 1 year to the day that I noticed those pictures were corrupted. Stupid 1yr warranties. Maybe I'll call them up and try to RMA it anyway, at least I might get the satisfaction of telling them I'll never buy one of their products again.

Monty
 
I read this in the "Corruption 101" thread.

System Timing Problems: Setting the timing for memory or cache access too aggressively, or using a hard disk interface transfer mode that is too fast for the system or device, can cause data loss. This is often not something that will generally be realized until after some amount of damage has been done.
Click to expand...

I have played around with my memory timing. Is this a real possibility for causing the data corruption I've seen? I'm talking about large chunks of files, like I played one of my .avi files and in the middle of playback it switched to a DVD that I'd ripped to my hard drive, and played that for 30 seconds. That was weird.

Thanks,
Monty
 
Snump said:
Whoah... all the pics were filled with the letter P? I'd be interested to see that.
Click to expand...

Sorry to burst your bubble but the Ps were what I saw when I looked at the file with a text editor. Also, I deleted the files but I'm pretty sure it was P, maybe it was some ASCII character or something. I do remember that IrfanView (pic viewer) said they weren't jpegs and wanted to change the extension. Then it displayed a picture that was just a big pink square.

Monty
 
ThomasE66 said:
Are you overclocking?
Click to expand...

Yes, a little.

Truthfully, I don't know much about overclocking memory. My BIOS has settings labeled Normal, Fast, Fastest, Turbo. I think I set it to Fast. I've played numerous hours of games and run 3DMark05 a bunch of times without incident so I figured I was okay.
My Barton 2500+ is running at 185x11. I have some (I believe generic) 512MB PC2700 I got from Best Buy.

I've been looking for a good stress test for verifying stability so I could better understand and overclock my system. Any advice where I could find such a program (preferably free) would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Monty
 
MrMonty said:
Yes, a little.

Truthfully, I don't know much about overclocking memory. My BIOS has settings labeled Normal, Fast, Fastest, Turbo. I think I set it to Fast. I've played numerous hours of games and run 3DMark05 a bunch of times without incident so I figured I was okay.
My Barton 2500+ is running at 185x11. I have some (I believe generic) 512MB PC2700 I got from Best Buy.

I've been looking for a good stress test for verifying stability so I could better understand and overclock my system. Any advice where I could find such a program (preferably free) would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Monty
Click to expand...

A good lace to start would be with SiSoft Sandra.
 
I ran memtest86+ and found somewhere between 444 and 512 errors in my memory. I'm guessing that's the problem since all my hard drive checks turned up nothing.

Monty
 
Bad ram makes the entire system bad. Sorry about your pics, man.
 
mwarps said:
Bad ram makes the entire system bad. Sorry about your pics, man.
Click to expand...

Fortunately I lost very little. The pics were only some of the 50+ I took when trying to get my kids to pose for a Christmas picture.

This was all probably a good thing because it motivated me to do some serious backup work.

Now I'm in the hunt for 1GB of nice RAM for a nice price. Looks like prices are falling as I type. Should be able to pick up some good stuff for about $100 shipped.

Monty
 
MrMonty said:
I have played around with my memory timing. Is this a real possibility for causing the data corruption I've seen?
Click to expand...

especially tRAS violations, never monkey with the tRAS there is no improvement in performance to be had there
http://www.lostcircuits.com/advice/ibm_maxtor/4.shtml
http://www.lostcircuits.com/memory/ddr1/8.shtml

(for those not aware of who is the author of Lost Circuits here is an interview w\ Micheal :p )



overclocking was a hugh corruption issue before you where able to lockout the PCI bus (whuch is now common) as the IDE Bus is a part of the PCI bus

sorry about the RAM going bad, it is always the first thing I check in any corription senerio
 
Ice Czar said:
sorry about the RAM going bad, it is always the first thing I check in any corription senerio
Click to expand...

I'm not sure I'm about to pin this on the RAM yet. I just read through the whole Memory FAQ and learned me a few things.
1. My processor FSB and Memory speed aren't the same and that's Bad.
2. When I test the RAM in my secondary computer, it checks out okay. The RAM from that computer then has errors when put into my primary system. Somethin' fishy there.
3. Now that I understand all those timings a little better, I'm going to manually set them and test them since it's quite possible that my generic RAM SPD may be screwing things up.

Now I'm hoping I can solve my problem with some motherboard tweaks and maybe come out of this with a performance increase and more stability.

Thanks,
Monty
 
serbiaNem said:
It could be a virus that ate up the pictures. Try doing a virus scan.
Click to expand...

That was the first thing I did. Besides, there were about 20 other pictures in the same directory that were untouched, not to mention the other 1000 or so in other directories. It really just seemed like a sector on the hard drive got wiped out or something.

I still have a hard time believing the memory is the culprit. It's not like I was editing the pictures when they disappeard. Once I get the memory test to give me a passing grade I'm going to make sure everything's backed up and do some more exhaustive HD testing. I'm just not convinced there isn't a HD problem still. A little paranoia, when it comes to data loss, is probably a good thing.

I'd be glad to hear from people telling me it most likely was the memory, that'd help put my mind at ease a bit.

Thanks,
Monty
 
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