blue screen of death

Jo-Anne wrote:
"Michael W. Ryder" wrote in message
...
Jo-Anne wrote:
"Terry R." wrote in message
...
The date and time was Thursday, August 20, 2009 10:40:47 AM , and on a
whim, Jo-Anne pounded out on the keyboard:

Late last night, while running Malwarebytes (just to check, no
indications of malware) on my older computer, I got the blue screen of
death. It took forever to get Windows XP (SP3, fully updated) back
up--blank screen for a long time after the splash screen. I've never
gotten the blue screen before with this computer, which I've had for 6
years.

I immediately tried backing up with Acronis True Image. It seemed to be
doing OK, so I went to bed. When I got up today, I found that Acronis
had stopped the backup and showed two error messages indicating the
possibility of bad sectors on the disk. I Googled the error messages,
and the first one seems to be specifically Acronis; the second had only
one entry in Google, and it was in, I think, Chinese. For what it's
worth, the first error message was E000101F4: "Failed to read data from
the disk. Failed to read data from the sector 49,832,581 of the hard
disk 1." The second error message was EE00070003: "Failed to read data
from the disk. A possible reason might be bad sectors on this disk."

Right now, I'm backing up all my data files, Favorites, and OEQB to a
flash drive. I'll then also, if possible, back up the files to a DVD.

Could bad sectors cause the blue screen? And if so, what should I do?

I'll check also with the Acronis forum, but it wasn't Acronis that
caused the blue screen, so I'm figuring it's not the main problem.

Thank you!

Jo-Anne



Hi Jo-Anne,

Bad sectors can absolutely cause blue screens. I've had it happen
personally and on client machines.

You probably have a good backup prior to the crash, so just getting the
most current important data is all you need.

You could try running check disk with the /F parameter (will require a
reboot), but I would look into replacing the disk.


Terry R.
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Delete NOSPAM from the email address after clicking Reply.
Quick question, Terry. If I run check disk with the /F parameter, is
there any chance that it can make things worse? What I'm hoping to do is
make the hard drive copyable (that is, be able to use Acronis to do a
full image that I can later restore to a new hard drive)--and once I do
that, then replace it. As I mentioned earlier, right now Acronis can't do
a backup.

Thank you again!

Jo-Anne
The last time I had a boot drive start failing Ghost would not copy the
drive because of the bad sectors. I used Spinrite to fix the drive errors
and was able to clone the drive with no problems. It is not free-ware but
I have been using it since the days of DOS to repair failing drives. In
my case I needed information on the drive that was placed on the drive
after the previous day's backup and I didn't really want to spend weeks
installing, patching, etc. all of the programs on the drive.

Thank you, Michael! I take it that you didn't try checkdisk at all, then?
I've known about Spinrite for many years. Maybe I should give it a try.


When I first started using Spinrite, around 20 years ago, checkdisk did
not work on the disks I tried to repair. Spinrite has never failed me
so I use what I know works rather than hope that someone finally fixed
checkdisk. The other way to look at it is that you get what you pay
for. As checkdisk is a "free" utility I expect it to be less capable
then Spinrite, much like a lot of people feel that free Linux is less
than expensive Windows


Jo-Anne