A specific file appears to be causing my SSD to freeze and then BSOD

[Megaone]

First of all, my system: 5800X3D - MSI B450 Tomahawk Max - 32GB RAM CL14 3200Mhz - Seasonic Focus Gold 1000W - RTX 4090 and as for storage: Kingston KC2000 2GB NVMe (boot drive) - Samsung 870 QVO 4GB - WD Blue 4GB HDD

 

So I had a bunch of game screenshots on the boot drive (the KC2000) and I wanted to transfer them to the HDD. I did that and everything was going smoothly until the transfer reached 87% and just froze, with the KC2000 showing 100% disk activity under task manager but with nothing transferring. I waited a while and it eventually said there was some kind of I/O error and the file transfer was aborted. I tried again a couple more times and now it immediately froze with the exact same symptoms.

 

I took note of the file name the transfer was freezing at and tried transferring every other file except that one and they all transferred without a hitch. If I even select the other file, the same thing happens: the system becomes unresponsive with the drive pegged at 100%. This last time however, I actually got a BSOD that said "WHEA_UNCORRECTABLE_ERROR", which forced me to reboot. After the reboot my boot drive disappeared from the BIOS and I was like WTF but turns out that's normal (some sort of safely measure to protect the SSD). After turning the PC off and on again, the drive was back online and the PC booted normally and I'm even using it right now without issue but now I'm scared of even clicking that screenshot again. I don't even care about keeping it anymore, just want to delete it but if I touch it, the same thing will happen. As long as I don't touch it, the PC works flawlessly.

 

So what's the deal here? Why is this particular file causing this issue? Has the area of the disk it's recorded on gone "bad", like the old HDDs used to have bad sectors? According to HWinfo, the disk is at 89% health with 100% drive available spare, no errors and no warnings. Temps are also good, hovering around 35C with a recorded peak of 45C.

[Blasty Blosty]

Can you open the file?

[Megaone]

5 minutes ago, Blasty Blosty said:

Can you open the file?

No, like I said even selecting it (causing the OS to "read" it) will trigger the windows explorer to become unresponsive and the drive pegged at 100% active time.

 

I was actually thinking I could maybe delete it using the command line but even if it works, I'm worried it might happen again if the OS eventually writes another file in the same space that one was and the same thing keeps happening.

 

I guess I can always just forget about that file and keep using the PC normally but that's not really an ideal solution lol. Plus I'm curious about what exactly is the problem here

[Blasty Blosty]

1 minute ago, Megaone said:

No, like I said even selecting it (causing the OS to "read" it) will trigger the windows explorer to become unresponsive and the drive pegged at 100% active time

Must be cursed

 

Oh well I guess you may just have to leave it and work around it, unless you want to try using a 3rd party file explorer to see if that cna remove it?

[Megaone]

1 minute ago, Blasty Blosty said:

Must be cursed

 

Oh well I guess you may just have to leave it and work around it, unless you want to try using a 3rd party file explorer to see if that cna remove it?

lol, I edited my reply before seeing yours. You kinda read my mind a little. But like I said, I still want to know what exactly is the problem and if this could mean the disk is failing, even though HWinfo says it's fine

[Blasty Blosty]

Just now, Megaone said:

lol, I edited my reply before seeing yours. You kinda read my mind a little. But like I said, I still want to know what exactly is the problem and if this could mean the disk is failing, even though HWinfo says it's fine

Might not be failing, could just be badly corrupted to the point where any access to it breaks everything

[Megaone]

5 minutes ago, Blasty Blosty said:

Might not be failing, could just be badly corrupted to the point where any access to it breaks everything

But why only this specific file (at least as far as I'm aware)? I've been using this system since 2019 (only having updated the CPU and GPU) and never had any problems. I'm really paranoid there might be something wrong with the disk.

[porina]

I've seen data corruption in lower end branded SSDs before and wonder if this is the same. As a precaution I'd backup anything important. If Kingston offer SSD software use that to check the SSD initially. Also what does SMART report? Anything of interest? I've seen SSDs have problems even when not reporting problems.

 

Then I'd do a full surface read of the SSD. It may well crash again on that same part. Generally errors are not unexpected as they will eventually happen, but you'd hope they'd fail more gracefully than this. It should detect and map out bad areas with spares on next write. The problem might be the corruption is so bad it can't silently do this. For redundant storage use cases, it is better to have a disk fail than to give bad data and that might be what they're doing here.

[PDifolco]

23 minutes ago, Megaone said:

lol, I edited my reply before seeing yours. You kinda read my mind a little. But like I said, I still want to know what exactly is the problem and if this could mean the disk is failing, even though HWinfo says it's fine

Corrupted file I think 

Check the game files if possible, else uninstall it, and check your drive health 

[Megaone]

20 minutes ago, porina said:

I've seen data corruption in lower end branded SSDs before and wonder if this is the same. As a precaution I'd backup anything important. If Kingston offer SSD software use that to check the SSD initially. Also what does SMART report? Anything of interest? I've seen SSDs have problems even when not reporting problems.

 

Then I'd do a full surface read of the SSD. It may well crash again on that same part. Generally errors are not unexpected as they will eventually happen, but you'd hope they'd fail more gracefully than this. It should detect and map out bad areas with spares on next write. The problem might be the corruption is so bad it can't silently do this. For redundant storage use cases, it is better to have a disk fail than to give bad data and that might be what they're doing here.

Kingston has a tool, this is what it says:

 

 

7 minutes ago, PDifolco said:

Corrupted file I think 

Check the game files if possible, else uninstall it, and check your drive health 

No need to check the game files, this is just a screenshot I took with MSI afterburner. They're completely unrelated