Serious problems, crash, very long scandisk and bad clusters in pagefile.sys

[amos]

Just did a windows update on 8 different machines, some WinXP, some Win2k. Since then all of them have been having serious hard disk problems (atapi - did not respond before timeout), have crashed, and have gone into a 3 hour long scandisk routine, reporting bad clusters in various place, but all report them in pagefile.sys. This keeps repeating, and disk problems are getting more serious. All have different hardware.

What on earth is going on?

[amos]

Also all the drives were definitiely running at Ultra DMA (as seen in the IDE channel properties), and all are now marked as PIO.

This all happened within days of each other. These computers have different software etc. If it is a virus, I can't think where it came from. I only use netscape, and haven't downloaded anything. I get no virus warnings.

[osprey4]

Windows will throw them into PIO if it detects problems, which seems like what it did. Do you know which update? I'm sure other users would love to know.

Try reloading the OS on one machine and see if that helps.

[amos]

Well. The only machine not affected has yet to have

KB824145
KB832483
KB828749
KB828035
KB825119
KB826232
KB823182
KB824141
and
KB828026

although as this has affected both Win2k and WinXP, it is likely not to be a 2K specific one. Mind you, the only machine which has not been crashing also has NTFS, so that makes it a little different.

Even so I usually update at around the same time, and so the above list is probably something like the recent update list.

Thanks re the PIO - I just worked that out. Deleting the driver and rebooting fixes that. What I'm surprised by is the fact that sandisk is taking a vast time to scan - it normally doesn't take long (usually 15 mins not 3-8 hours). Also scandisk is finding so many errors that something serious seems to be happening. On one machine it found a whole directory (with about 600 files in it) to be unreadable.

At first I thought it a hardware problem and bought a new hard drive. But when they all started dropping, I obviously ruled that one out.

I am really stumped by this. I can find no references. On two machines it kept producing vast numbers of "Unknown Hard Errors" all the time before going down. The others seemed to grind to a halt, with the hard drive not working properly - taking many minutes to load a paged out file for example, and then crashed.

Actually it is plausible that all the crashes occurred on paging, which might explain why pagefile.sys was effected. Certainly on one machine it commonly occurred when going in to screensaver mode.

[amos]

Sorry - where do I check what directx verson i have.

[golfcart]

Start > Run > dxdiag

[amos]

Thanks golfcart

okay so they are all (including working machine) 9.0, so that is not the problem.

[amos]

The other thing is that all the computers started giving

An error was detected on device \Device\Hardisk0 during a paging operation.

or similar errors for some while before (and after) crashing. Another reason why it seems paging errors are to blame.

A google search suggests loads of people seem to be having this. Everyone seems to be thinking it is a hardware problem. But not on 8 independent computers I tell you!

Could others check their event logs to see if they are getting any errors similar to the above?

Also is it me, or are there many people around who are saying their XP has recently started booting up slowly? That was the first thing I noticed, which is why I checked the logs, startup progs etc. Nothing abnormal except these occassional paging op errors. Maybe there are more people being hit by this than we know.

[osprey4]

I know there have been buggy hotfixes in the past that slow some machines to a crawl. My philosophy, never be the first to download these. I believe they can be uninstalled from Add/Remove Programs if you know the number.

[phil_monk]

This could be down to copyed software??????? microsoft can detect the windows key you have and will know if it is copied.... i am not accusing you of anything so don't thake this the wrong
way?