Question Windows has become corrupted since installing a new HDD ?

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KailyKail

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May 8, 2024
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I purchased a refurbished 26TB HDD from the Seagate store, and installed it into my PC tonight. Windows booted like normal, and I did a drive check with CrystalDrive. It showed three boots, of which two were mine. It showed zero hours of uptime.

Pretty soon, I noticed things going bad. Applications were crashing, including Chrome, Firefox, Explorer, Windows Search, and others. I then started getting repeated blue screens. I checked the mini dump files, and one of them said it was my NVIDIA driver, so I attempted to update that. It did not work. It kept failing, so I followed instructions to use a DDU and then reinstall, as NVIDIA would not let me uninstall in safe mode, and would not respond in normal boot. I then tried to reinstall the driver, and it kept giving me a 7zip: CRC error. I read it was a possible issue with a corrupted TEMP folder, so I followed further steps to fix that. It did not help.

I have also tried to remove the new drive, but the issues remain. At this point, I have no idea what might be causing the problem. I’m in the process of creating a Windows 10 installation media, so I’m hoping that will fix the problem.

Does anyone know where I might have gone wrong?

PC Specs
OS: Windows 10 Home
CPU: Intel Core i9-14900k (RMAd and BIOS updated)
GPU: RTX 4070 Ti
RAM: 64GB DDR5 Corsair Dominator Titanium
OS Drive: Samsung 990 PRO 2TB M.2 SSD
Various other SSDs for games and such
 
I was considering factory refurbished 12TB Seagate drives advertised on Amazon at a very attractive price, but decided against buying after reading various blogs and checking the Backblaze statistics.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/s7i5bc/fyi_some_anecdotes_indicate_that_12tb_seagate/

The model in question was the ST12000NM007, with a failure rate of 11.77% (half way down the list).
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q3-2024/

1-Q3-2024-Quarterly-AFR.png


Now it's possible Backblaze may have purchased batches of bad drives, or Seagate may have issued a firmware update to address unreliability issues, but it put me off buying this particular 12TB model. I was considering 8 x 12TB in a TrueNAS RAID-Z2 server for 72TB effective storage.

It might be worth locating your drive in the Backblaze data to see if it's supposedly reliable or not. A few Seagate drives have a 14% failure rate at Backblaze. You might need to download several 1GB files to find your drive, but it's probably there.
https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/resources/hard-drive-test-data

Sorry I can't be more optimistic, but if your 24TB drive features in Backblaze data at over 5% failure rate, I'd be inclined to exchange it for a different brand or model.

KailyKail said:
I’m in the process of creating a Windows 10 installation media, so I’m hoping that will fix the problem.
Click to expand...
It's not clear to me if you're installing Windows 10 on the 24TB hard drive, but I'd suggest an SSD (either 2.5" SATA with DRAM cache or M.2 NVMe) would be a far better candidate for the Operating System. Keep the 24TB drive for data only, not OS.

In addition, if your 24TB drive is SMR (as opposed to CMR), it's really not good as a Windows boot drive, with all the amplified-write operations due to shingled layers. In my opinion, SMR is OK for rarely used data archives, but most definitely not for intensive disk operations such as video editing or Windows. I no longer buy any SMR, preferring CMR even if they are more expensive per TB.
https://techwiser.com/smr-vs-cmr-drives-comparison/

I always run Hard Disk Sentinel's non-destructive surface 'Read test' on any new or second-hand hard disk I purchase, to check its health. This takes around 10 to 12 hours on an 8TB drive, so you can expect up to 36 hours on a 24TB drive, if your system keeps running this long without crashing.
https://www.hdsentinel.com/help/en/61_surfacetest.html

img_60_surf1.gif


Good luck.
 
I just ran one (EDIT: a memtest86, since apparently I don't understand quoting on this site yet) last night. It passed with zero errors. I also just spoke with a friend of mine who says he had the same issues I did when it came to reinstalling Windows.

I tried to reinstall via the USB media, and I kept getting errors. Occasionally, I would even blue screen on the installation media itself. It didn't matter if I used a different USB installation media or different hard drive. I kept getting the same errors. Even if I unplugged the Seagate drive.

I took the m.2 I wanted to install Windows on and put it in my laptop, and was able to reinstall with zero issues. However, if I then took this drive back to my desktop, the installation was unstable. I could log in and do things, but lots of stuff would freeze, and I had trouble installing programs like Firefox or Chrome. Edge would also constantly crash web pages. I would still get blue screens every so often - about as much as I was getting before trying to reinstall Windows.

I spoke with a friend last night, and he said he was having the exact same issues related to reinstalling windows, and even though he ran a memtest with no errors, he replaced his ram and his issues resolved. I'm headed to Microcenter after posting this to buy a cheap module to test. Honestly, I'm starting to think that might be the case, because I've swapped out literally everything else and nothing works.

EDIT 2: I'm using an EVGA 850W BQ Bronze PSU.
 
Last edited:
Misgar said:
Good luck.
Click to expand...

I plugged the drive into my laptop via a dock, and it seems to be stable there, so I'm starting to think the drive itself is no longer the issue. I still have no idea what might have caused it to glitch out when placing it above the bay though. Honestly, now that I'm thinking about it, my other 1TB drive also seemed to have "failed" after doing the same thing, although that one took much longer to do, certainly longer than the <5 minutes the 26TB drive did. I think I had both the 1TB drive and 4TB drive in my case for a good 10 months before it went (supposedly) bad. It too, still works in my dock without issues.

I will definitely check that list though. As for testing, when I installed the drive, I used CrystalDrive to check the uptime, as a friend suggested. It showed zero uptime and one boot that wasn't mine (3 total boots). I will run that test once I figure out if the ram issue is what's causing my current instability.

Here's a picture of the bay in question. The drive that always stays stable goes in the bay itself. Any drive put on top goes haywire and crashes the PC.
IMG_7952.jpg
 
What should I do if Windows refuses to install on the desktop then? I keep running into error codes 0xC0000005 and 0x8007025D when attempting to install.

I did try new RAM, and that did not resolve the issue. The only things I have not swapped out are my CPU and GPU, but I don’t have the money to drop on spare parts like those to test bench things.

Am I just better off taking it to a shop, or is this something I can still try fixing myself?
 
KailyKail said:
What should I do if Windows refuses to install on the desktop then? I keep running into error codes 0xC0000005 and 0x8007025D when attempting to install.

I did try new RAM, and that did not resolve the issue. The only things I have not swapped out are my CPU and GPU, but I don’t have the money to drop on spare parts like those to test bench things.

Am I just better off taking it to a shop, or is this something I can still try fixing myself?
Click to expand...
Which OS? 10 or 11?

Following this exactly, what specific step does it fail at?

How To - Windows 10 clean install tutorial

If you are looking for the Windows 11 Clean install tutorial, you can find that here: Windows 11 Clean install tutorial (Click here) Otherwise, welcome to the Windows 10 Clean install tutorial This tutorial is intended to help you, step by step, to perform a clean install of Windows...
forums.tomshardware.com forums.tomshardware.com

How To - Windows 11 clean install tutorial

Windows 11 Clean install tutorial This tutorial is intended to help you, step by step, to perform a clean install of Windows 11, version 23H2 or newer but can be equally applied to earlier versions which may have some basic differences in the screens you see but will largely remain similar in...
forums.tomshardware.com forums.tomshardware.com
 
USAFRet said:
Which OS? 10 or 11?

Following this exactly, what specific step does it fail at?

How To - Windows 10 clean install tutorial

If you are looking for the Windows 11 Clean install tutorial, you can find that here: Windows 11 Clean install tutorial (Click here) Otherwise, welcome to the Windows 10 Clean install tutorial This tutorial is intended to help you, step by step, to perform a clean install of Windows...
forums.tomshardware.com forums.tomshardware.com

How To - Windows 11 clean install tutorial

Windows 11 Clean install tutorial This tutorial is intended to help you, step by step, to perform a clean install of Windows 11, version 23H2 or newer but can be equally applied to earlier versions which may have some basic differences in the screens you see but will largely remain similar in...
forums.tomshardware.com forums.tomshardware.com
Click to expand...
Windows 10

Following those steps, word for word, I fail at section 2, step 8, in most cases. Sometimes I will fail at section 2, steps 1-7, depending on how my luck is. If I fail in steps 1-7, I will get error code 0xC0000005 or I will be taken back to step 2 with no error code. If I fail at step 8, I get either error code 0xC0000005 or 0x8007025D.

I did attempt to boot Windows after getting home from dinner, but where it would previously boot into Windows, albeit unstable after initially installing it on my laptop and moving the drive over, it now boots into automatic repair, which fails, and prompts me to reinstall via media or cloud download, both of which fail, and give me the option to try again or shut down.

I did also attempt to reset the CMOS, but that did not help either.
 
KailyKail said:
What should I do if Windows refuses to install on the desktop then? I keep running into error codes 0xC0000005 and 0x8007025D when attempting to install.

I did try new RAM, and that did not resolve the issue. The only things I have not swapped out are my CPU and GPU, but I don’t have the money to drop on spare parts like those to test bench things.

Am I just better off taking it to a shop, or is this something I can still try fixing myself?
Click to expand...
here are your error codes:
: kd> !error 0xC0000005
Error code: (NTSTATUS) 0xc0000005 (3221225477) - The instruction at 0x%p referenced memory at 0x%p. The memory could not be %s.
2: kd> !error 0x8007025D
Error code: (HRESULT) 0x8007025d (2147943005) - The specified buffer contains ill-formed data.
i think bit verification is turned off by default for usb thumb drives.
you can start cmd.exe as an admin then run
verify
and it should tell you if it is on or off.

verify on it think will turn it on but it will make all thumb drive copies take much longer to make. (because it checks to confirm the copy)
also, depending on your cpu, and bios version you can get corruption on usb copies depending on what port type you are using. IE you might find a usb 2 port will work without corruption while the usb 3 port will result in corruption.

in any case, you need to make sure your network driver is updated then run
cmd.exe as an admin then run
dism.exe /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth
this should repair corrupted windows files that were corrupt on the install.
you will also want to dump/delete your current pagefile.sys by
turning off windows virtual memory and turning it back on again to create a new pagefile.sys (do this to prevent saving corruptions to disk and reloading them )


if the drive shows corruption after the install, you want to update the cpu chipset drivers, you should have already updated the bios to the current version.



if you continue to have issues after the bios and driver update and the dism command. I would next go and turn off lazy writes for the drive then look for a firmware update for the drive if there is one. note: turn off lazy writes will force data to be flushed to the drive and you should help get errors pushed back to you rather than the system just refusing to shutdown.
(for the case of cache or firmware bugs in drives)
I would use microsoft windows default drivers for the drive controller rather than the intel drivers as the microsoft drivers are more likely to work and will be updated with windows updates.
 
Last edited:
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