Causing BSODs or caused by BSODs?

I was hosting a minecraft server on my PC and simultaneously playing on it with the client program (Java programs). The server program constantly writes data as the map is generated and changed. I started getting total crashes while playing, which became more and more often. The screen would turn a solid color but sound would continue to play at like 20% speed (which sounds terrifying if you're listening to music). Sometimes the computer would reboot itself, sometimes not.

After one such crash, the C: drive stopped being detected and the computer wouldn't boot until I diddled around in the bios. CHKDSK ran, and replaced some bad clusters in the minecraft map files.

I moved hosting to a different computer, and have since only been running the client (which I'm assuming doesn't constantly write new data as I play). I'm still getting these crashes though. Last night it took a turn for the worse. The desktop started freezing, the pc wouldn't shut down, and then windows would just sit on the loading screen. Hell, even safe mode wouldn't load. I shoved my windows CD in and repaired it, got CHKDSK to run again (which replaced a shitload of bad indexes, and several more bad clusters in the windows directory this time).

Now it seems to be working, but I don't know for how long.

Basically what I want to know is: does my disk have some sort of defect causing these errors, or are these crashes/hard reboots causing the disk to start fucking up hard? I'm leaning toward the latter... but can't say for sure. Memtest86+ ran clean, so I guess it's not the RAM. Temperatures are all normal across the board. Help me out here.

5/16/2011 4:38:34 PM

Causing BSOD.

Most likely you'll want to grab a new drive and image ASAP. My experience with bad sectors is that they grow exponentially due to some kind of mechanical failure.

5/16/2011 4:57:25 PM

Crap.

Guess I'll order a new 1tb drive. How hard is it to image the drive?

5/16/2011 10:08:24 PM

30 min edit window closed.


edit:
I always assumed the hard reboots after BSODs were shitting up the file system, with minecraft/java being the root cause of all these BSODs and subsequent cluster damage - but it's the other way around?

So Minecraft basically exposed some existing flaw in the hard disk itself?

5/16/2011 10:56:33 PM

Or Minecraft wore out the HDD.

5/16/2011 11:13:38 PM

When it detects bad clusters its not just corrupted data from a crash or an intersive operation. Its a flag that the physical surface of the disk has been damaged. There is no way to recover or overwrite badsectors. What scandisk or some other repair utility is doing is creating a map of places it knows are broken.

But my experiemce is you treat it like yoir cars paintjob. Once a chip damages the seal the entire area becomes more vulnerable and that cascades until your drive is unusable.

Just to be sure you can run scandisk during bootup and see what it says.

Imaging is easy with the right software. Ghost is the industry standard but there are a variety of free or open source programs that can hande the task pretty easily.

5/17/2011 12:56:32 AM

easeus todo backup home is free and should do what you want

http://www.todo-backup.com/products/home/download.htm

5/17/2011 7:57:24 AM

Copied everything over and so far so good on the new drive. Turns out the defective one is still RMA'able after 2 years. Guess I'll have a lot of extra storage now. Thanks guys.


Update. Still getting BSODs playing minecraft. Fuck. It flashes the same solid color screen, but this time it restarted almost instantly. Something about sysdata.xml and minidump when it came back up. Any ideas now?

[Edited on May 19, 2011 at 11:47 PM. Reason : shit.]

5/19/2011 11:27:30 PM

In the advanced system properties, uncheck the box that has the computer reboot when you get a BSOD

5/20/2011 7:24:07 AM

^^ It's highly possible you lost data if you detected bad sectors. Have you retried to ole faithful reinstall and overwrite?

If it's not machine specific have one of your buddies email you the offending file and backup and replace yours.

5/20/2011 10:06:42 AM

^I'm thinking about just starting clean and see where it goes. 4 hours of memtest yielded no errors. Guess I'll try it out tonight.

5/20/2011 12:30:29 PM

^memtest (to my knowledge) doesn't test your disk, it tests your RAM.

You'd want to run scan disk or disk doctor or any of a myriad of surface testing tools to detect problems. But once you've imaged the disk to a new hard drive it's exponentially harder to detect problems on the original disk.

You best bet would be to stick the 2nd drive in your machine and run scandisk on it. Or boot to a recovery disk and scan it.

5/20/2011 12:53:03 PM

^i thought it might be ram related after the brand new drive bsod'ed last night. Right now my computer is running otherwise smoothly off the new western digital RE4. Cloned from the original bad RE3 drive last night.

5/20/2011 2:10:27 PM

Ok so I cleaned out the new drive, fresh install of windows. Installed java, minecraft, and the latest nvidia drivers.

Exact same problem. Screen turns a random solid color, and stays that way until I hold down the power button.

At a total loss here. Maybe it's the video card? I get the feeling if I keep playing this game I'll have another broken hard drive on my hands. All this constant power cutting must have done the first one in. Fuck.

5/20/2011 6:28:42 PM

Sorry for the triple post but yeah, still no luck here.


So here's what I've ruled out:

1. Hard drive - Still getting the same crash with the new drive, both with fresh windows install and clone of old drive.
2. RAM - 4 hours of Memtest yielded no errors.
3. Antivirus - Played minecraft with ESET NOD32 disabled (nothing else open)... got about 2 hours in, and my hopes were high. Then it crashed.

Still the exact same symptoms: Minecraft playing windowed. Suddenly the entire screen turns a solid color (seems to be based on what the game is displaying). If music is playing on a separate program, it continues to play, just at an extremely slow speed (occasionally regular speed). Sometimes the computer will restart afterwards, sometimes holding down the power switch is all you can do. If it restarts itself, it will show a dialogue box detailing a BSOD once windows starts. If hard rebooted, nothing shows up out of the ordinary.

Could it be the graphics card somehow? This crash has happened across multiple nvidia driver updates, so I don't think it's driver specific. I've had stuttering while playing portal 2 and some weird flickering while playing Battlefield BC2, but nothing like the minecraft lockups. Temps are also well within range across the board. I may try swapping my GTX 295 with my roommate's 480 to see if I can reproduce it.

Any other ideas? Btw thanks for all the help so far wwwebsurfer, you probably saved my data before it all took a shit.

5/23/2011 1:11:27 PM

From a quick google search minecraft seems to be in a "rough" beta. There are so many articles and posts on random crashes I can't even sort through it enough to find if there's a problem its pointing to (like driver version or java version.)

My guess is that it's game related - that it will clear with an update or two. If you can run Portal 2 without crashing your machine you can safely rule out problems in terms of overheating and probably most driver questions.

Create a second partition and install the ubuntu version of minecraft

5/23/2011 1:55:19 PM

^haha I might actually try that linux idea if this doesn't work. I'm currently using the GTX480 and waiting for a crash.

5/23/2011 6:25:41 PM