[SOLVED] HDD failing or bad ram/ram slot or bad motherboard?

jollly

Commendable
Dec 28, 2017
3
0
1,510
SPECS:

Gigabyte s1151 ga-h110m-s2h
i5 6500
gtx 1050 2gb
hyperx 2x4 ddr4
1tb seagate barracuda st1000dm010,
samsung ssd 120gb (I have windows on this)

So I was about play Sea of Thieves with a friend but i had to update the game and in order to do that you have to have windows updates enabled (because of microsoft store), i have windows updates turned off in the local group policy editor. Picture: View: https://imgur.com/a/LkYwAfy

So i turned it back on but forgot to restart or force update policy through cmd and i clicked play my pc started making a continuous noise sounded like a whirring fan. Then i slapped the top of my case a few times and it went away and when i tried to load in a game it started taking forever so i quit the game and restarted my pc and it was stuck at the shut down screen for 15 minutes, got unpatient and force shut down the pc.

After restarting it didn't want to boot windows (I "succesfully" booted in once before repairing but it was extremely slow and windows crashed so i restarted again) and after restarting enough times it loaded me into the windows repair screen, so I repaired and i was finally able to boot in but i noticed that a lot of files got corrupted and I couldn't open programs like steam,discord so applications that have frequent updates when booting up the system (could've got corrupted that way) and my hdd was making a weird noise when in use. HDD's sound: https://voca.ro/hYeuks7rI3o

So i checked my SMART stats with crystaldisk it said its healthy then ran all the available basic tests in SeaTools and all of them passed but in the meantime it was still making the noise and new files still got corrupted after countless of restarts. Also windows went through the disk repair many times, probably 80% of the reboots it started fixing the disk(I clicked on disk repair in windows before so it wasn't automatic but it basically did it almost every bootup so thats probably not a good sign).

Then i got suspicious of my RAM so i removed one stick and it ran through the windows disk repair fairly quickly and my hdd didnt make that noise, but then after restarting and trying other things it started again with this single 4gb ram in the pc only, so i ran a full memtest86 3 times on both sticks at the same time and it found 0 errors and just in case i ran a memtest on the stick that i removed before which had 0 errors as well. So i ended up with the conclusion that no matter which stick and which slot i use i still have the issue.

What could this be? Did my data get corrupted because I force shut down while it was maybe trying to update windows (since i enabled it back just before without updating policy, that could have messed up something) Or is my HDD failing in a way these tests can't see?

Should i just reinstall windows on my ssd and run some software that scans for corrupted data on my HDD?
Or could it be my memory causing corrupt data and my HDD making that noise is because its trying to read corrupted data?
 
Last edited:
Solution
One immediate problem is the 120 GB SSD with Windows.

For today's systems you should have 240 GB.

So before reinstalling Windows - consider a larger capacity SSD.

Next: Sudden power losses, slapping a computer (especially with a HDD) can indeed cause physical damage and file corruption.

Add in the potential for corrupted updates and there can be (and are) all sorts of problems.

PSU: make, model, wattage, age, condition?

Look in Reliability History for error codes, warnings, and even informational events that occurred when game loads failed. Or other errors for whatever reason.

Ralston18

Titan
Moderator
One immediate problem is the 120 GB SSD with Windows.

For today's systems you should have 240 GB.

So before reinstalling Windows - consider a larger capacity SSD.

Next: Sudden power losses, slapping a computer (especially with a HDD) can indeed cause physical damage and file corruption.

Add in the potential for corrupted updates and there can be (and are) all sorts of problems.

PSU: make, model, wattage, age, condition?

Look in Reliability History for error codes, warnings, and even informational events that occurred when game loads failed. Or other errors for whatever reason.
 
Solution

jollly

Commendable
Dec 28, 2017
3
0
1,510
One immediate problem is the 120 GB SSD with Windows.

For today's systems you should have 240 GB.

So before reinstalling Windows - consider a larger capacity SSD.

Next: Sudden power losses, slapping a computer (especially with a HDD) can indeed cause physical damage and file corruption.

Add in the potential for corrupted updates and there can be (and are) all sorts of problems.

PSU: make, model, wattage, age, condition?

Look in Reliability History for error codes, warnings, and even informational events that occurred when game loads failed. Or other errors for whatever reason.

Okay so I completely forgot about the PSU, and that just reminded me that 2 years ago i had to send it back and replace it beause it was making loud noises.
Its the APPROX APP500LITEB02 500W and apparently its a really bad PSU so I'm definitely gonna replace that. That could also explain the noise when booting up Sea of thieves which caused me to slap the case (which could have pyhsically damaged the HDD), it was probably the PSU fan.

And then the corrupted files are probably just the result of the force shutdown.