Blue screen woes and hard drive bad sectors

laceyGB

Honorable
Apr 15, 2013
9
0
10,510
For the past seven days I've had multiple BSODs every day in various error flavours:

SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED
DRIVER_CORRUPTED_EXPOOL
IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA
MEMORY_MANAGEMENT

I've tried a whole bunch of different things to solve the problem:

Ran memtest86 for 9 hours, it reported no problems with RAM after 9 passes
Removed RAM and graphics cards, tried them in different slots
Updated graphics card drivers
Removed all graphics card drivers
System restored
Repaired Windows with the installation CD
Ran chkdsk - first time I ran it there was a BSOD in the middle of the process! Second time it went fine and reported no errors

Finally I checked my hard drive in Seatools:

Smart Test: Failed
Short Test: Failed, had to run Seatools for DOS
Long test: Ran til 69% and stopped at 99 errors, "repaired" them
Long test 2: Ran til 99% and detected 90 errors, "repaired" them
Short test 2: Passed

And the blue screens persist. Is my hard drive royally screwed? Is it the cause of all these problems? Can I trust these "repairs" and look for the cause of the blue screens elsewhere, or is the hard drive the main culprit?

Thanks :)
 

Paperdoc

Polypheme
Ambassador
Very likely the repairs that Seatools was able to do for you just replaced the bad Sectors it found with spare good ones. BUT in that process, if the data on the bad sector is corrupted, there is NO way to correct that, and the bad data will just be replicated into the replacement sector. Thus the file containing that data is no good any more.

If you're confident all the bad sectors have been "fixed" in this way, then try Repairing the Windows Install again. That may replace corrupted system files with new good copies.

You should realize, however, that the failed SMART test result plus your other problems indicate that this HDD has accumulated a lot of bad sectors which now have been replaced with good spares. BUT that probably means it will continue to deteriorate and develop more bad sectors. It's probably time to replace the HDD. Do it SOON while almost all your files are still OK, and you can still get it to work well enough to clone it to a new HDD.