Sudden frequent (daily) index errors, freezes

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Hi All!,

I have XP with SP3. I have recently begun having daily index errors occur on the system drive. These appear to be related to periodic freezes and lockups of the system or of any given application. When this occurs, I cannot connect with my email server or connect with any browser. This situation is always cured, at least in the short term by running Chkdsk. I began to think that my 4 year old drive was getting long in the tooth and suffrering too many read/write errors, so I replaced it with a new one. Same issue is happening and the old drive never turned up any bad sectors, so perhaps it is something else. The machine is homebuilt, details are attached. The registry is quite clean and although I use Diskeeper 2008, it has never in the past created errors at this pace. All index and security errors are in these items: $Sll file 0x9 and $SDH file 0x9. Being a software junkie, I could not begin to say that this started after I did X, Y or Z. I’m always checking out stuff – but not of a questionable nature. I run Malware Bytes weekly and have Charter Security Suite, neither of which have turned up any issues.

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Hi Mark and welcome to the Lounge!

Have you checked the SATA data cable attached to the system drive to be sure it is secure? Check the other end that is inserted in the SATA socket on the motherboard as well. If you have another SATA cable that is known to be good, try that one to see if the errors clear up.

I had a bad SATA data cable one time and I was getting corruption on the hard drive. On another, I found the SATA cable was not seated firmly, and after removing and reseating the errors went away.

Hope this helps.

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Could be time to re-seat all your connectors to make sure you have good connections.

cheers, Paul

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Gerald & Paul,

Thanks for your quick replies. I did check SATA cables, in fact I switched with one on another drive. I blew out all connections before reattaching things. It has a metal locking tab on the connector, so it is now on the system drive. We will see what develops.

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You could try to remove all indexing across the board, boot, then restart the indexing and have it re-index everything all over again.
That’s a simple measure to try out if you havn’t done it already, and give it the time to do it. In the end you may need to taper indexing if at all possible with some specific directories.

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Clint,
The index errors I was having were file system errors. What I ended up doing was to backup My Documents, address book, and drivers. I had a good system image from a week ago to fall back on. A repair install of XP did not solve the issue, so I did a complete clean install and did a full format in NTFS prior. I think this was the key as so far after recovering my system image, I have had no issues. A few reboots to sort out some minor driver issues and restoring the small amount of data from the last week and I am in good shape. I can only assume that the file system had become corrupted, as in the last two days I could not log off or shutdown(even overnight).

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Sounds like your hard disk may be on it’s last legs. Get a copy of the disk diagnostic tools from the disk manufacturers site and test.

cheers, Paul

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Paul,

All diagnostics show the drive (which is brand new) to be fine-all parameters are well within normal ranges and there are no bad sectors or blocks. The difference after doing a full NTFS format is striking which leads me to believe that True Image only does a quick format when cloning a drive. With a current image always in the hopper, it might not be a bad idea to do a periodic format prior to an image recovery. I think there was a deeper problem with the file system as the errors I had still occur, but without symptoms. I do need the .NET framework for some things, and recent updates were rather specific to IIS, which is only installed on servers. I can match this to errors shown in Event Viewer. I am quite certain that these errors occur on every machine with all the .NET updates applied which do not have IIS installed.
I think that the low level format was the greater issue, as when I installed the last drive I cloned it as well. I will set Diskeeper to only run manually on the system drive and do a chkdsk prior to running a defrag job once a week or so(or after installing or removing software).

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Quick format is all you ever need – it just sets the MBR and MFT rather than writing to every sector of the disk.
Is the rest of the hardware OK?

cheers, Paul

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Paul,
No other hardware issues. Still getting errors, but today I had Diskeeper terminate in an unusual way and got an error about loading a dll. I ended up uninstalling and reinstalling it this morning and have not had any errors since. Windows is prone to file degradation over time, “bit rot” is how one person referred to it. I have uninstalled some less used applications and reinstalled some of the ones I intend to keep. I will do the same with the rest and have run SFC after purging the cache. I’ll let everyone know if I track down the exact culprit. Going to run the most recent Malicious Software Removal tool tonight on a full scan. Malware Bytes and the Charter suite have turned up nothing so far.

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Windows does not have “bit rot”. Hard disks may suffer some degradation over time, but they have in-built mechanisms to fix this. RAM is refreshed all the time and the electricity is nice and stable (just as well for us). What you do get are software errors (bugs) and hardware errors due to age / manufacture / dirt.

cheers, Paul

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I ended up doing a clean install. I tried a Repair install to no avail, so it must have been a software conflict/registry issue. It wasn’t so bad as I was organized with all my software and keycodes. The other bonus is that I have far fewer applications now. Kind of like software rehab.

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Update! After much searching, I have come to the conclusion that Diskeeper is the cause of my disk errors. With automatic defrag running on the system drive, errors after one day on a newly installed system only a week old are approaching 100. With automatic defrag off, I’ve had no errors at all on 4 full test periods of 24 hours! What is odd is that this behavior only started a few months ago. I wonder if an OS update has changed the way Diskeeper works. In the short term, I will do a manual defrag once a week after chkdsk and followed by another chkdsk. I have found a number of references to this same problem on the web in recent days.

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Defrag is bad m’kay! Only do it once every 6 months tops and leave the rest to Windows.

cheers, Paul

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Hi All,

I have dumped Diskeeper. I have gone with Ultimate Defrag 2008, set up the disk once with things where I want them for fast access. I will not do this often, and when I do only after a chkdsk followed by another after defrag. The other issue turned out to be my Charter Security Suite. When I checked for application errors, there was one for every boot cycle regarding a DAAS rejection of the Deep Guard configuration. I also noticed that several of the downloads for the Suite were not successful. I used the removal tool, and did a new full install of the Suite and all errors are gone in event viewer. I have not had any lockups, and while after a week chkdsk finds a few odds and ends to touch up, they are just normal file system housekeeping. Getting to this point, I have created a new full drive image. I had one issue when switching users, so I installed the User Hive cleanup utility and have had no repeats.

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Chkdsk should not find any errors if all is well. Is your new disk a Seagate / Maxtor 500GB? There are firmware problems with those drives – upgrade available.

cheers, Paul

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PT,
I have found through some research and checking with other XP users that over time it is normal for various index and file system errors to occur. However, now when they are present they produce no negative symptoms. I run Chkdsk weekly prior to defrag and a handful of minor inconsistencies are always present. Also, these are not the same errors that were happening before with Diskeeper and a bad Security Suite install.

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