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Recently I've been having some issues with corrupt data on my hard drive. I did some reading, and apparently it can be do to bad memory modules in my RAM. If this is in fact true, I'd appreciate if someone could reccomend a good memory diagnostics program.
Hi there Viper,
I am not too sure what to recommend as you did not tell us anything about your system specifications. What operating system, processor, RAM type etc. There are quite a few diagnostics proggies out there but no point in suggesting one that won't work on your box?
I have another thought though :) What is your hard drive, and its specifications.
In recent years hard drives have got bigger, so their associated cache has grown as well. Processors have also become much faster, FSBs and so on. Now, when your HDD shuts down, the HDD cache should be written to the drive....but sometimes the system can shut down too quickly for that to happen, giving you data corruption.
There is actually a Microsoft fix for this, that basically inserts a pause in the Windows shut down sequence to let the HDD complete its shut down! Once again, I would like to know a little more about what you are running.
EDIT: Sorry, what do you mean by "corruption"? what exactly do you notice.
Cheers
Well its XP Pro with sp1 and all updates up to now
2.26 GHz P4
512 MB (2x Kingston RDRAM pc1066)
Primary HD 60GB WD
Secondary (the on i get corruptions on) 180GB WD1800JB...something
And by corruptions I mean when the little box pops up by the system tray saying I have a corrupt or unreadable file, and it tells me to run chkdsk. I'm noticing them mostly in my download program (overnet) temp file folder, but there are so many and they are so numerous then when i run chkdsk other files begin getting deleted and restored. I'm not entirely sure whats happening with it, and I doubt its a bad HD.
Using NTFS on both drives
I would be inclined to run a surface scan on that drive just to eliminate the bad drive question, if only in your own mind?
Because they are internet type temporary files, the cache issue might be still valid? I suppose to prove that I would clear my temporary files, internet stuff, most recent documents and so on THEN shutdown. What puzzles me is that you say that you have a large number, when I would only have expected a few?
See if you still have the problem?
If you do, then I would suggest that the rapid shutdown is not the issue, and we shall have to look elsewhere.
Please keep us posted.
Cheers
It's not browser related, overnet is an external program. And these serious corruptions happen only after I leave the program on for a long time, like overnight. What software would I need to scan my HD?
for testing your RAM modules i would suggest using memtest86
http://www.memtest86.com/
very easy to use.
good luck
i had an issue with my RAM a while back, was getting all sorts of BSOD's in XP pro, write errors, data loss (files would just dissappear altogether), this started happening overnight for no apparent reason at all, ran memtest86, over 500 erros in 1 pass of it...
another thing you can do, check you system event logs (in comp mangement, admin toosl i think), that may give you an idea of what may be happening...
Well ty for the info. Btw, how long did a full ram test take for you? I've got 512mb pc1066 rdram, and I left it on overnight and I came down 16 hours later and it still wasnt done, or does it just restart?Quote:
Originally posted here by mrleachy
i had an issue with my RAM a while back, was getting all sorts of BSOD's in XP pro, write errors, data loss (files would just dissappear altogether), this started happening overnight for no apparent reason at all, ran memtest86, over 500 erros in 1 pass of it...
another thing you can do, check you system event logs (in comp mangement, admin toosl i think), that may give you an idea of what may be happening...
Hi,
If you let them, these RAM tests will run 7 or more times. You need to set it to "run once" the first time, then it should run for about 2-3 hours.
Cheers