Boot Problems (XP Pro SP2)

Topic

New Reply

xp pro sp2, patched, P4 3.0 gHz, 1 gig ram, 40 gig sata c: drive, other drives for data and backup

Hi folks, Happy Solstice. My machine is about two years old. For the past few months I would get an occasional black screen with: Windows could not start…. with the cause being configsystem most of the time, and an occasional hal.dll. Pushing the restart button on the computer would invariably load windows, and I would not experience any further problems. I researched the errors a bit but never went any further as it would always restart. Last couple weeks it got worse, so I ran a full checkdisk, which found no errors.

Yesterday it gave the configsystem error repeatedly. Tried safe mode and it stopped on the configsystem line. I booted from my xp disc to the recovery console, ran bootcfg /rebuild and fixboot. No Change. Recovered the c: drive from an Acronis image and restarted successfully. Worked the rest of the day. This morning, same thing, would not boot, did not re-attempt the rebuild command, but recovered from the same Acronis image again. Ran a Western Digital diagnostic on the drive in question with no errors.

Is it just time for a clean install? I have not attempted a repair install from the xp disk. I also read a somewhat complicated procedure to restore the registry from the first boot after the original install, but don’t really know if that is worthwhile versus a fresh install.

Am I missing anything obvious? I’m not a tech person, but a reasonably self-educated user.

Thanks, David Parker

Reply | Quote

Replies

Can you check the Windows Event log to see if there are any errors occuring. This could help us decide whether this is more likely to be a hardware problem or a piece of rogue software.

StuartR

Reply | Quote

Thanks for your response

There are some errors and warnings on the system page of the event viewer. The most common ones are-

Warning, ftdisk, event 57, The system failed to flush data to the transaction log, corruption may occur (a group of several today, and a couple every few to 10 days going back as far as the log goes, about a month)

Error, Service Control Manager, event 7000, The UDNT service failed to start due to: The system cannot find the device specified (a few times a day, most days)

Error, disk, event 11, The driver detected a controller error on DeviceHarddisk3D (one long string a week ago), same with Harddisk4D (one long string of them 2 weeks ago)

There are a few others intermittently about a browser not finding the network, or my removable hard drive being turned off, a couple that look network related (2 machines on a home wireless network), an occasional printer error.

The application page has a very occasional- Warning, userenv, event 1517, Windows saved user OWNER-C5BD57BEAOwner registry while an application or service was still using the registry during log off. The memory used by the user’s registry has not been freed. The registry will be unloaded when it is no longer in use.

Don’t know if this helps or not

Thanks, David

Reply | Quote

That was very helpful. Those entries certainly would account for disk corruption. You have almost certainly got a faulty disk drive, although it could possibly be a problem with the disk controller on the motherboard (but that is unlikely).

How many disk drives do you have, and what partitions are on each one?
Do you ever take away a removable disk without telling windows that you are going to do so?

StuartR

Reply | Quote

Thanks Stuart

I have three hard disks- 40 gig c: drive, 160 gig d: drive for data, 160 gig removable drive with f: and g: partitions for system images and data backup. All sata, all NTFS. The removable drive is in a tray and has a switch, it is turned off except when needed for backups. There’s no option (that I know of) for “safe removal” as with a usb drive, I just wait until the drive activity light is off to switch it off, or switch it off after shutdown. I do use a flash drive occasionally, have it set for safe removal, and use the tray icon to remove.

That being said, one of my event errors is- Error, PlugPlayManager, Event 12, The device ‘SAMSUNG HD160JJ SCSI Disk Device’ (SCSIDisk&Ven_SAMSUNG&Prod_HD160JJ&Rev_WU105&28c68dfa&0&000) disappeared from the system without first being prepared for removal. (this is the removable disk drive)

This error seems to occur with the ftdisk error in my first post, and sometimes with a disk error, event 15, The device, DeviceHarddisk2D, is not ready for access yet. (or similar)

Thanks, David

Reply | Quote

These entries in the event log are quite worrying.

Error, disk, event 11, The driver detected a controller error on DeviceHarddisk3D (one long string a week ago), same with Harddisk4D (one long string of them 2 weeks ago)

I’m trying to work out whether Harddisk3D and Harddisk4D are the same disk. My best guess is that these are both your D drive and that on one occassion your removable drive was present and on the other time it wasn’t. This suggests that it’s time to get a new D disk drive to me.

I would strongly recommend against removing any disk drive without stopping it from Windows first. Can you look at the disk properties in Device Manager and see if you have a properties tab that will let you set the policy for caching of this disk. (See screen shot in post 604,390).

StuartR

Reply | Quote

Hi Stuart

On the policies tab for the removable disk drive, Write caching and Safe Removal choices are greyed out, the “enable write caching” checkbox is absent. I am looking at this from an admin account. This drive is identified as SCSI, has a SCSI Properties tab with “Disable tagged queing” and “Disable Synchronous transfers” both unchecked. I don’t know what this means, the drive is SATA.

Thanks, David

Reply | Quote

It seems to me that Windows doesn’t know that is a removable disk drive, so everytime you disconnect it you risk causing unrecoverable data corruption.

I am pretty sure your other problem is a faulty drive D:

StuartR

Reply | Quote

Thanks Stuart

Interesting… I will try in the future to not shut that drive down when windows is running, although all the documentation I have seen on this type of setup has not mentioned this. I will also run checkdisk on the D: drive. As an aside, should checkdisk be run from a command prompt versus from the windows interface (or in safe mode?)

Happy holidays

Thanks, David

Reply | Quote

You can run CHKDSK /F from a command prompt whilst windows is running. If chkdsk needs exclusive access to the disk then it will offer to run when you reboot windows, if it does this then immediately reboot.

CHKDSK is very unlikely to give a permanent solution, controller errors are indicative of a hardware problem.

StuartR

Reply | Quote

What does the OME of this drive and removable frame say about “Hot swapping”?

Who is the Drive OEM and frame OEM?

DaveA I am so far behind, I think I am First
Genealogy....confusing the dead and annoying the living

Reply | Quote

The rack is an I-STAR T-7 and claims to be hot swappable, the drive is a SAMSUNG HD160JJ, from the Samsung product page- “Hot-Plug & Hot-Swap capable”

Thanks, David

Reply | Quote

I do NOT see where this drive is Hot Swapable at http://www.samsung.com/Products/HardDiskDr…ies_HD160JJ.htm%5B/url%5D, where did you get your information?

DaveA I am so far behind, I think I am First
Genealogy....confusing the dead and annoying the living

Reply | Quote

last item in the “Features” list

Reply | Quote

Sounds like the Disk controller does NOT support Hot Swaps.

DaveA I am so far behind, I think I am First
Genealogy....confusing the dead and annoying the living

Reply | Quote

I have internal SpinPoint drives in one of my PCs and they are definitely hot swappable. So this is either a driver issue, or a controller that doesn’t support hot swap.

StuartR

Reply | Quote

The removable Samsung Spinpoint drive is running through a Silicon Image SI 3512 controller card that also claims to be “hot swap capable”. I guess this leaves the motherboard, an intel PS 83-BL, I looked at the manual and can’t find anything one way or another about hot swap capability, but I am beyond my knowledge here, I dont know if it is even a factor.

If it is a driver problem, would it be the controller card driver, or some driver for the mainboard, or ?

I appreciate the help with this, interesting what it leads to.

One more puzzlement- After googleing “The driver detected a controller error on DeviceHarddisk3D” (and Harddisk4D, see post 621,807 above), I saw many different Harddisk *numbers*, but always the letter D. I found no definitive answer on how to identify the physical drive, some saying D: drive, some saying it’s the drive number as identified in disk management. In my case, the C: drive is always disk 0, the D: drive is always disk 1, and removable drives are numbered according to the order they were activated.

Stuart felt both those errors were referring to my D: drive.

I am going to order a new drive to have on hand at the very least, maybe I can figure something out by disconnecting my D: drive and seeing if the computer will behave any better without it.

Thanks again everyone for your input. All suggestions are appreciated.

David

Reply | Quote

To check which drive is being reported, have a look in Disk Management at the drive numbers, these should correspond to the HardDisk3 or whatever that is reported in the event log.

To get more ideas about possible causes of Event ID 11 from source Disk have a look at eventid.net.

StuartR

Reply | Quote

Just an update- I have been able to trace the-

Error, disk, event11, The driver detected a controller error on DeviceHarddisk3D (one long string a week ago), same with Harddisk4D (one long string of them 2 weeks ago) post 621,807 above-

to a removable flash drive trying to read an unsupported memory card. Close checking of the system event log turned up an-

error, disk, event 7, DeviceHarddisk0D, Has a bad block

This is definitely my C: drive, so I will replace that drive and see if it is the culprit.

Again, thanks for everyones help, I always learn something here- David

Reply | Quote

Though this rack and drive claim to support hot swapping, the following is written to the system log when it is switched off.

Event, Source, Event ID, Description

Error, PlugPlayManager, 12, The device ‘SAMSUNG HD160JJ SCSI Disk Device’ disappeared from the system without first being prepared for removal.
Warning, Ftdisk, 57, The system failed to flush data to the transaction log. Corruption may occur. (8 times)

This is after a period of drive inactivity. It doesn’t sound too good, but I don’t know if it constitutes a problem or not. As I mentioned in post #621,929 above, the property tab that optimizes drives for safe removal is greyed out for this drive. As Stuart said, the system apparently does not see this as a removable drive.

David

Reply | Quote

I will add that the removable disk drive is running through a controller card (not raid). Device manager shows no problem with the card. I’m *quite * sure that this problem began before I added this drive and card. I think it was one of the things that motivated me to solidify my backup regimen.

David

Reply | Quote

Once you get the disk drive issue resolved, have a look at Download details: User Profile Hive Cleanup Service for the 1517 error.

Joe

--Joe

Reply | Quote

Thanks Joe, I will check that out.

David

Reply | Quote

David,
Do you have an Acronis Image that is older than the one you last tried?

The image you created may contain the very problem that you are trying to resolve and you are just putting it back when you restore the image.

Reply | Quote

Hi Bob

I thought of that too. The oldest image I have is two months, not pre-dating the start of the problem, but before it became as severe as it is now. I estimate I first noticed this happening 4-6 months ago. I have not restored from this one yet. Right now the machine is running and I am just leaving it on.

Thanks, David

Reply | Quote