Defrag timeout equals dying drive?

Hey guys, it's been quite a while since I've posted, so I'll understand if anyone wants to get up me for being scarce :D

Anyway, I've been getting a few errors lately, odd stop errors, and now, errors in DfrgFat.exe (when I'm defragging, obviously!). I was going to add a picture showing the error and some S.M.A.R.T readings, but they were bigger than 1 byte :P So if someone wants the S.M.A.R.T readings, i'll send it or something, but for the moment, this is the error exactly:

"The specified I/O operation on \Device\Harddisk0\DR0 was not completed before the time-out period expired." Options: Cancel, Try Again, Continue
I get this error a few times in a row, and if i click cancel it tells me that data may have been lost or something.

When something happens again, I'll be sure to add it.

Some system specs that may help.

Intel PIII 1.08Ghz (Yes, its overclocked)
512MB SDRAM (Yes, its overclocked)
Windows 2000 Professional SP4
Liteon LTR-52246S (Cd Burner)
Liteon LDW411S (DVD Burner)
WD 400JB (40 GB WD HDD)
Geforce 2 GTS (Forgot the brand, overclocked a fair bit)

Also, I'm using Diskeeper as the defragmenter, but I'm pretty sure that'd make no difference.

Anything I've forgotten? Sorry, I'm a little sick as it's winter over here!

Also, my first guess was virus/ trojan/ overclocking issue, but it's been a long time since i've overclocked all these things so it'd be strange for them to suddenly have an impact now, right? Also, as for virus/trojan infection, i'm up to date with virus definitions, and have done the usual checks (processes list, startup items etc.)

Well thats all I can think of right now, so thanks for looking :D

Where have you been ? Daily attendence is required or we don't answer ..

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Originally Posted by confus-ed

Where have you been ? Daily attendence is required or we don't answer ..

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That wasnt very nice, bad mood?

BTW, This isnt the Tech Lounge.

:D .. only kidding ! ;)

At the risk of stating the obvious you have run chkdsk ? (ticking both boxes so that it runs at boot)

All that overclocking may have an effect timing wise on cached writes for your drives, but like you say you'd expect issues like that to show up straight away so if your systems been like this for 'ages' it seems unlikely that that's it ..

As for SMART, well it ain't very smart - it collects stats on completed & verified writes, when it thinks too many are happening (not all writes ever get done first time, some allways need doing again) then it signals, maybe the logs of that can be more illuminating, but they never have for me except to confirm what I was already suspicious about, say like a failing boot sector block (or some other 'about to be "bad" sector'), which chkdsk should be able to know about anyway ..

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Originally Posted by TechZ

That wasnt very nice, bad mood?

BTW, This isnt the Tech Lounge.

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Only a wee wotpp joke ;) .. didn't think anyone was up yet to notice .. I just did an answer :)

What UP, its 12pm here in the afternoon that is.
I can never enable SMART on my WD, even started a thread, couldnt do it.

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Originally Posted by TechZ

What UP, its 12pm here in the afternoon that is.
I can never enable SMART on my WD, even started a thread, couldnt do it.

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You just 'snuck in' while 'part 2' was being typed that's all ;)

For SMART to work you need a smart capable drive & motherboard - does that answer that bit for you ? Personally I don't think its much 'kop' (slang: 'of practical use') it monitors whether writes are sucessful & maintains stats on that, well the o/s can do that its called write verification, it just doesn't give you stats, but it will tell you like above that writes aren't completed (you get a bit of a different message - but the same 'result').

Okay, I did run chkdsk, but instead of running it at boot time, i did it in cmd and forced it to dismount the volume. NO errors were found whatsoever. I will tell chkdsk to run again on startup though.
Also, got a little program that someone recommended in another thread that monitors S.M.A.R.T and that program told me everything was sweet on the HDD.
Beginning to get a little suss about this, wondering if i should lose recently installed stuff and bring back couple-month old ghost image of the C drive (NOT the volume that is having problems, did I mention that?)

p.s what the hell does wotpp stand for?

My board supports smart, anyway since its not much kop ;) i'll stick with what i got.

Whats the time there?

Way of the Post Padders: A group dedicated to increase their posts any way possible. Join

But we dont bother others, mostly ppl in the Tech Lounge.
Leader: adept

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Originally Posted by TechZ

But we dont bother others, mostly ppl in the Tech Lounge.
Leader: adept

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Err its a 'joint conspiracy' - I'm supposed to be enforcer - so I'll just add Good wotpp practice is to stay off live technical threads until you have 'teh way' .. & hope you take the hint ;)

Ok, how do I join? OR HAVE I ALREADY?!?!!? :p

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Originally Posted by G Man

Okay, I did run chkdsk, but instead of running it at boot time, i did it in cmd and forced it to dismount the volume. NO errors were found whatsoever. I will tell chkdsk to run again on startup though.
Also, got a little program that someone recommended in another thread that monitors S.M.A.R.T and that program told me everything was sweet on the HDD.
Beginning to get a little suss about this, wondering if i should lose recently installed stuff and bring back couple-month old ghost image of the C drive (NOT the volume that is having problems, did I mention that?)

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Need to run it at startup else it can't check system areas. (MFT being the one that needs checking most that won't get done the way you did)

You need a smart util that specifically states it can do your drive & board, or at least whatever revision level of smart is applicable to your hardware, there's some pretty 'shonky' utils out there that don't take account of this ..

Can you explaain the last bit again for me ? .. I was just about to tell you that generally running FDisk can map out any bad & failing sectors much better than Chkdsk can, by the sounds of it you may be in a position to clear the volume ? (but as I said I'm not so sure).

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Originally Posted by G Man

Ok, how do I join? OR HAVE I ALREADY?!?!!? :p

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Oh everyones a wotpp'er whether they know it or not as soon as they've replied to anything or posted, you've been here before & know how 'mad' we are here sometimes, so its just a game, but new posters sometimes get bewildered by it all, hence the 'no wotpp'ing on technical threads "rule"' I was hopefully reminding Techz of 'gently' (I may have stuffed up the 'gentle' bit ;))

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Originally Posted by G Man

Ok, how do I join? OR HAVE I ALREADY?!?!!? :p

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Put a message in your sig "WOTPP Recruit"
and post like crazy from today, esp in the Tech Lounge,
in around 2 months i went from 100 posts to 600, avg. 30 per day,


PS confused i dont think he's intersted in the answer, he's more interested in the WOTPP way. ;)

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Originally Posted by TechZ

..PS confused i dont think he's intersted in the answer, he's more interested in the WOTPP way. ;)

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:grin:

maybe both ?

Well... It's a FAT32 volume, so the bit about MFT isn't really applicable, and also, I can't really empty the volume coz its pretty full :P and theres nowhere to put it. I'll probably just get a new hardy soon anyway, seeing as 40GB is getting a bit small. Nevertheless, I was just hoping someone had seen the error before and knew of what was the cause - I did a search on google and found bugger all! A little suss...

Yes, well, hopefully I too am on my way to 600+ posts ;)

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Originally Posted by G Man

Well... It's a FAT32 volume, so the bit about MFT isn't really applicable, and also, I can't really empty the volume coz its pretty full :P and theres nowhere to put it...

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File allocation table under the 'FAT' file system = Master File Table under 'ntfs' not the same thing exactly (works a bit different) but same principle, & importantly same effect, once the o/s is fully loaded anything run from within it so 'cmd' can't then 'see' those bits as they are 'in use' - so for either file system 'at boot' is 'bestist' ;)

So running Fdisk to remap any bad failing sectors out then is a non starter as we don't have enough room ! (confus-ed-ness at work there ! ;))

If you take away this smart util, is windows reporting any write behind errors ? it may just be this util slipping you duff info ? ...

First of all, thanks confused for the 'Introduction to File Allocation Systems', heh, and then... erm... what was i going to say.

Oh yes, write behind errors. No none of them, just a lot of those errors in defrag, and a few stop errors as well. I think they pertained to page faults or something? Not usually something to do a stop error on, page faults... the words exception not handled mean something. Anyone know of a log file which logs stop errors?

Ahhh .. now we are getting somewhere .. stop errors & 'memory page faults ?' sound like the timing errors we were saying would happen staright away, maybe some windows update or something similar has changed things a bit & all that overclocking IS now an issue ?

But what kind of 'madness' is this asking for a util to get rid of log file errors ? :D - that's what we are for ! ;)

Examples of all the errors may make matters clearer ..

I just had an idea, to look at the event log. And heres a few more errors for you to weed through!!! I'll just paste them in.

The request is incorrectly formatted for \Device\Ide\IntelAta0.

An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk0\DR0 during a paging operation.

{Lost Delayed-Write Data} The system was attempting to transfer file data from buffers to \Device\HarddiskVolume2. The write operation failed, and only some of the data may have been written to the file.

Nuts... I think i've got problems, since yesterday, about 30 hours ago, i've had 2,585 of these errors! I have a few suspicions, and will investigate one right now, and get back to you.

And more: according to task manager, SERVICES.EXE has had a firm grip on the CPU for more than 4 hours... The idle process has only 2! I'm going to ghost back my old system state in the hope that this all dissapears!

Well just keep posting the info in 'wotpp fashion' (caught on real quick there to the idea ! :)) & when you actually have a question, I'm sure I/someone can help you out, but do let us know how it does pan out ;)

Yes! Information must be posted... due to... requirements! yes! requirements!

Anyway, I've just ghosted everything back with no problems so far. I wouldn't be suprised if I never saw that problem again, but if i do, here's where you'll hear about it!!!

Dont forget to make a good Ghost this time, always need a good/recent ghost.

Greetings g-man.

Although you have now rectified your problem, I wonder if you did have a virus after all. Here is a note from the Symantec site.

Services.exe

Note: The services.exe file is located in the c:\windows\System32 folder. In other cases, services.exe is a virus, spyware, trojan or worm! Check this with Security Task Manager for free.

Virus with same name:
W32/Leave.B (service.exe) - Symantec Corporation
W32.Randex.R (service.exe) - Symantec Corporation
W32.HLLW.Kazping (service.exe) - Symantec Corporation
W32.XTC.Worm (service.exe) - Symantec Corporation


My own thoughts are that unless you have a very high number of programs/processes running in the background then the legitimate services.exe will not be using all your system resources as yours was.

The other possibility is that, as you stated your hard drive was very full, that windows was having difficulty building/maintaining the page file....

In this situation it will time out and fail to defrag - seen this several times, particularly using aftermarket defrag software. I have also come across FAT32 drives so badly fragmented that they simply refuse to defrag without timing out, although persistence will eventually prevail. Oddly, I've never seen this with NTFS, though I still personally prefer FAT32!

You can sometimes get it to work in safe mode, but the only proper solution is to free up some drive space, or get a bigger drive.

Raxco Perfect Disk http://www.raxco.com/ seems to be better than most at dealing with NT/2K XP systems.

John

G Man you also described the drive as FULL - how full is full?

Hey all, I have an update for you!!!

First of all, whilst using an audio decoding utility earlier, I got this error, which seems very familiar, so I'm sure I've had it recently.

==Delayed Write Failed==
Windows was unable to save all the data for the file \Device\HardiskVolume1\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Temp\DMC11.tmp. This may be caused by a failure of your computer hardware or network connection.

Anyway, after that, I got a little pissed off, so I tore my computer apart (carefully!) and put it all back together, changed the setup of the IDE channels and finally restored backup. I'm beginning to think maybe it's the motherboard as I just remembered that this motherboard has previously lost first parallel and then later, serial connectivity, and also has had some problems with IDE channels and PCI slots too. I don't know why I didnt think of that earlier!

But anyway, just in case this is a /real/ problem, I'll answer some questions. I've got two partitions, the C is 8GB, and contains windows and the swap file (plus programs) and is NTFS. The other 30 odd gigs is my D drive and is FAT32 and is, I'm fairly sure, where the problems are all occuring, seeing as defrag messed up whilst defragging that volume. Although my most recent error appears to be on the C.... When I said the volume is pretty full, I meant too full for any formatting etc to take place, theres 5GB on the C and about 8 on the D, so plenty of room, by windows standards.

Thanks guys.

Well, nice to see everyones running around mad trying to sort out my problem :p
Just kidding guys. Anyway, today I decided to zero out my drive using the WD utilities, and, long story short, I ended up restoring my ghost backup again coz windows xp nor 2000 would install, xp saying it encountered an error when trying to modify the partition information and in brackets was MFT, then 2000 said my HD was corrupt! anyway, maybe theres a problem with the master file table that only windows can see coz then i ran the WD utils again and ran a full test, which found nothing. Oh well, I guess I'm just gonna have to wait till I can afford a new drive. Thanks guys.

hEY GMan did you figure away to get rid of the annoying (every 30 seconds) pop up os a Windows- Device Timeout saying
"The specified I/O operation on \Device\Harddisk2\DR19 was not completed before the time-out period expired"
if so I could use some wisdom garnered at the school of hard knocks whats the magic ...actually anyone ??..??

How much are you overclocked? Have you tried setting it back?

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Originally Posted by MobilePCPhysician

How much are you overclocked? Have you tried setting it back?

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I haven't overclocked at all ive got the a fairly new box with
1 gig memory
AMD 3200 64
TWO 200 GIG HD
2 200 GIG EXTERNAL HD (FULLEST ONE IS ABOUT 90%)
A VERY FAST INTERNET CONNECTION AT T3 SPEED

MAYBE IT DOESN'T LIKE NOT BEING OVERCLOCKED (LOL)

check your hard disk number 2 - connections, data and type - is it a dynamic drive?

Heh, this threads still goin? Wow. Well I never solved my problem, but it did solve itself. One day it just stopped happening and now everything's back to normal. This was, however, after installing windows xp on another hdd, and then reverting to the old one to get some files off... then i noticed it worked fine again and have put it down to a slowly failing mobo or slowly failing hdd.... either way i don't mind :p