HD might not be dead, but it looks like cancer

[runningfish007]

The other day i was watching videos off of my external hard drive and i got a big fat BSOD. The error was KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR. Immidiately after this when i restarted my computer i noticed that the startup time increased dramatically. Everything up untill the windows xp loading screen went at the normal speed but then what used to take maybe 5-10 seconds now took more than 15 minutes to get through. Once windows finally booted my computer appeared to be running fine. I defragged both drives immediately without incident and then moved on to running scan disk. My external; was entirely clean but of course for my main drive I had to restart my computer to run the scan. It went through the scan just fine with no problemsand then booted normally. It was late so i called it a night and shut down the computer. The next morning when I turned it on it had the same 15 minute windows load followed by the scandisk screen. I just let it go and thought, " hey why not just let it go." It went through the first 3 stages without anything then when checkin the files it spammed the screen with replacing x file at x location. then about 30 minutes late as it was doing all that it said moving x file from x sector...not enough space to continue. It repeated that once more and then said there was an unspecified error. The strange part is that I have 60GB of space left so I don't believe that there isnt enough space. With nothing left to do but restart I did so. The scandisk came up again and gave entirely differnt results. Now it said there was problems with my indexing, gave the same no more space nonsense followed by an unspecified error. From there i just let it sit. My dad told me to skip the scandisk and move whatever i wanted to keep onto my external and just reformat, but when i tried to skip scandisk my keyboard wouldnt respond. After about half a dozen trys it worked for no apparent reason and i was able to get into windows. From there i started copying files to my external and durring my first copy+paste of my music files, i get another BSOD KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR. I restarted my computer once again and the scandisk ran all the way through without a single move of a file or error. It told me i had 12KB in bad sectors and then windows booted after about 20 minutes of being on the loading screen. Im currently transfering files other than my music to my external as we speak but i just have no clue what the **** is going on here. I'm sorry this wall of text is freakin huge but i just want to give the most possible amount of information.

MY SYSTEM:
Windows XP Pro on WD 120GB SATA HD
AMD 64 3200+
2GB Kingston PC3200 (4x512)
MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum Mainboard
Radeon X800 AGP


Thank you again and although its lookin towards a new HD for me...i just want to know what the **** happened before i go and do that.

 

[runningfish007]

*UPDATE*

another BSOD, this time unspecified.

I tried to turn off caching in my BIOS as the BSOD instucted and now on the windows loading screen the little blue bar is taking several minutes to go across just one time...

 

[RicoDirenzo]

XP may be corrupted. Boot to your XP cd. If you don't know how to do this you go into your bios and make your CDrom drive the first boot device. Once you are in setup do a windows repair. Let me know what happens. The other possibility is that that drive is progressively failing and losing sectors rapidly. chkdsk may be marking the bad sectors and as the drive continues to fail the amount of reported disk space and time to run chkdsk will increase until you get the boot error NTDLR not found. Then the drive is toast.

 

[shdwsclan]

There are also preinstalled environments..........basically....its that stupid undeveloped repair option from the xp install disk....but some people reverse engineered it and added real tools to it, a gui, networking support......basically an miniOS to fix your XP.....you can run many apps from it.....

You can also try to use knoppix.......

Now that was the general repair talk above.......

Now to the specifics....

KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR
This means that kernel data could not be read into ram during boot.
As you know, the os resides in the ram when running..............
This can be caused by a bad block in the paging file.....
You may want to delete the paging file.....windows will just rebuilt it.

It can also mean a disk\disk controller error which means there is something wrong with your drives\cables\controllers which is causing a misread or communications fault.....

The second BSOD may actually define it as a hardware error, if you were to specify the errors......



Try these solutions in order if the previous solution does not produce results


Run chkdisk using a bootable floppy or WinPE(which is the repair environment on the Xp setup disk.


Using winPe.......
Delete Page File
I'm not sure where it is though
you have to find pagefile.sys
and probably using dos......
use
cd someDirectory
to move up a directory
cd\
to drop down
dir
to list directories\files
DEL [d:][path]filename
to delete such a file

Then, if no results....
Use

BartPE
SuperWinPE
Knoppix

They are some PE miniOSes that have a lot of good tools in them but their use is not entirely legal....

 

[RicoDirenzo]

All very nice but he wants his system to run. Start with the repair of the OS using the standard protocol. You can tweak it later. The kernal probably isn't running in memory because the Hive stack in xp is corrupted...a missing or corupted .dll file. I heard so many people ***** about MS repair....it has always worked fine for me and all my client's. Just try that first. It's a no-brainer. If that repair is unsuccessful, other aproaches will be needed. Sheesh!!!!

 

[runningfish007]

Repairing as we speak...will post results when it finishes, its taking a while

 

[runningfish007]

It's been stuck at 80% on wmv8dmod.dll for about 45 minutes now




This is getting pretty reciculous. There isnt anything i really cant live without on that drive and ive got the 150 bucks or whatever to replace the HD, would it just be easier to go out and get a new one?