I have some Gremlins, it appears to be the storage, Sandy Bridge

Hardware HDD's & SSD's
1

Hi everyone, before I go reinstall windows, which I did a fresh install 6months ago, let me describe the issue, maybe it sounds familiar to anyone.

First, I did a lot of GPU swaps (had an old GTXX 750, then switched to a 1070 and later 1070 TI, when storage and boot issues started), almost every time using DDU utility in safe mode to clean the system after each GPU swap, but without reinstalling windows 10.

i7 2600
Intel DH61WW mATX, updated BIOS a year ago, Intel enabled UEFI support, I keep legacy boot enabled too, otherwise the win10 partition doesn’t show
2x4gb DDR3 Ram (I think Micron, nothing fancy)
EVGA SC 1070 TI - new, NVidia 397.x drivers
550 watts BeQuiet! 2 yrs old, no 80+ rating

No overclocking of GPU or CPU was done.

Storage:
60 GB AData SSD with Win 10 64 bit Pro kept up to date - 2yrs old cheap SSD - NTFS
60 GB Kingston v300 - Mac OS Sierra - 6yrs old cheap SSD - Clover + mac osx Journaled partition
1TB HDD WD Blue - NTFS
All on Sata

Issue
Upon boot, after the Intel logo, it would always give me the “A problem with the hard drive has been detected.” error, Boot selection menu, was showing me all drives as it should, and sometimes after selecting the Win partition, it got stuck on the Win10 logo loading.

All this mysteriously started after I swapped to the new GPU 1070 TI. First days it would boot fine, then after a few days of gaming, particularly after setting the device to sleep, overnight, once a download was done, I would find it rebooted itself into OSX which is the default. Proof that it restarted instead of shutting down (I think this is another issue with sleeping). So I take it the Win10 SSD is the culprit. After this it would always go into the “A problem with the hard drive has been detected.” issue.

So I took apart the PC, reseated & swapped the SATA cables (only for the SSDs), did a BIOS defaults load, and now it boots just fine. The new issue is that after a few boots, when trying to unarchive, probably a corrupt 40gb ISO,(MD5 checked ok) Windows explorer & 7zip would just freeze on the same file.
After rebooting, the folder containing the ISO on the HDD, appeared to be empty,
Rebooted again & now the HDD stopped showing in Windows.

Sorry for the long post.

2

sounds like a drive is about to die. you run an disk checking tools to find out the health on the drive?

3

I now see the hard drive back in windows explorer and i can write files to it.

I tried windows based tools such as the cmd command “wmic diskdrive get status”. Everything apparently this tool checked out ok and SMART seems enabled, unless you have another free tool that you would recommend to check and maybe fix errors.

Now it seems I may have found another clue, also related to unzipping an archive and writing to the hdd, this operation was taking far longer than it should for the few gigabytes the archive had, and about at the end I got the “store exception” blue screen error, this may have caused the restart earlier.

5

Apparently the issue was because the sata cable wasn’t that well connected to the drive (replaced it to be sure), now the writing speeds are back and so far the booting error is gone. Gonna check the drive for health issues next.

6

You can try running this in an admin command prompt:

chkdsk c: /f /r

Assuming that your Windows installation is on the C drive. You’ll have to reboot the system and let it run it’s course, which could take 1-4 hours.
Once it’s done, you can open up Event Viewer and filter through the log. Make a filter by application and select both the “chkdsk” and “wininit” applications. The log should now display results of what happened when you ran the command I wrote up there.

7

C:\WINDOWS\system32>chkdsk D: /f /r
The type of the file system is NTFS.

Stage 1: Examining basic file system structure …
342272 file records processed.
File verification completed.
1 large file records processed.
0 bad file records processed.

Stage 2: Examining file name linkage …
68 reparse records processed.
381676 index entries processed.
Index verification completed.
0 unindexed files scanned.
0 unindexed files recovered to lost and found.
68 reparse records processed.

Stage 3: Examining security descriptors …
Security descriptor verification completed.
19703 data files processed.
CHKDSK is verifying Usn Journal…
3627728 USN bytes processed.
Usn Journal verification completed.

Stage 4: Looking for bad clusters in user file data …
342256 files processed.
File data verification completed.

Stage 5: Looking for bad, free clusters …
67177988 free clusters processed.
Free space verification is complete.

Windows has scanned the file system and found no problems.
No further action is required.

976760831 KB total disk space.
707512120 KB in 215495 files.
95084 KB in 19704 indexes.
0 KB in bad sectors.
441671 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
268711956 KB available on disk.

  4096 bytes in each allocation unit.

244190207 total allocation units on disk.
67177989 allocation units available on disk.

So far so good. Were you referring to filtering “Windows logs> Application” & “Windows logs> System?” I did it, and no extra information about errors. Guess It’s time for a back-up. Thanks for the advice