HDD volume bitmap errors? (Causing 100% activity, W10)

[pow3rran9er]

(windows 10, haven't tested other OS'es)

 

Hi, i'm running 3 drives:

 

1x SSD 300GB or so for windows

1x large 1TB HDD for games

1x larger 2TB HDD for media (series, movies) or anything else i need stored.

 

The last one (slowest of the bunch at 6200 rpm) has been causing problems lately.

Explorer.exe will suddenly hang (windows 10), when going to task manager's resource monitor it shows a disk activity of 100%.

 

More commonly known issues causing this (prefetch, superfect, windows defender, etc..) have turned out not to be the cause of this situation. So i had to go deeper.

 

The SMART values of the drive are fine, there are no bad sectors at all either. When running chkdsk (no difference with /r or /f) it will sometimes fix it. For a good 2 minutes or so.

Chkdsk does however return the following:

 

C:\WINDOWS\system32>chkdsk D:/fThe type of the file system is NTFS.Volume label is Data.Stage 1: Examining basic file system structure ...  888320 file records processed.File verification completed.  3774 large file records processed.  0 bad file records processed.Stage 2: Examining file name linkage ...Deleting index entry Chkdsk20151129190837.log in index $I30 of file 17.  912462 index entries processed.Index verification completed.  0 unindexed files scanned.  0 unindexed files recovered to lost and found.Stage 3: Examining security descriptors ...Inserting an index entry with Id 419 into index $SII of file 9.Repairing the security file record segment.Cleaning up 1 unused index entries from index $SII of file 9.Cleaning up 1 unused index entries from index $SDH of file 9.Cleaning up 1 unused security descriptors.Security descriptor verification completed.Inserting data attribute into file 888068.  12073 data files processed.CHKDSK is verifying Usn Journal...Usn Journal verification completed.CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in themaster file table (MFT) bitmap.Correcting errors in the Volume Bitmap.Windows has made corrections to the file system.No further action is required.1953382399 KB total disk space.1025627468 KB in 872240 files.    376912 KB in 12073 indexes.         0 KB in bad sectors.   1014239 KB in use by the system.     65536 KB occupied by the log file. 926363780 KB available on disk.      4096 bytes in each allocation unit. 488345599 total allocation units on disk. 231590945 allocation units available on disk.

Which makes me believe somehow the volume bitmap gets corrupted or the file system has serious problems of some sort.

 

What's funny is that: index $I30 of file 17 reminds of this old windows issue: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/976329 but that can't be it (as far as i can tell ofc).

 

Between the massive ammount of people experiencing 100% disk usage only a few seem to be having the same issue. Even though this fella seems to have it too: http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/494865-what-the-hell-is-going-on/

 

The fact multiple people have this though, and the hard drive seems physically fine, makes me believe it's windows related. So let me explain a little more.

 

Inactivity keeps the drive at 0% (after a succesfull chkdsk). So does just watching a movie from the drive 90% of the time. No issue to be found. It seems to go wrong when you start writing to it too.

For example when i open up my torrent client to download an old TV series from the 90's, it will start writing some data to a .part file, and after a random ammount of time (from a sec to an hour) it will ramp up the disk usage to a 100% and hang both the torrent client and explorer.exe (assuming explorer.exe is accessing the drive, if not, it's completely fine!). Now when i close the client, and restart explorer.exe, i'm able to go into the resource monitor and see that the system, with location TVshowFrom90's.part is taking up basically the 100%, even though it's not writing. No way to shut it down either, best bet is to run chkdsk and hope it fixes the file index/ volume bitmap allowing me to download for another maybe 5 minutes.

 

This is just an example, but it might give more of an idea of what's going on and how frustrating this is.

 

I'm out of ideas which is why I'm posting this thread. Worst case scenario, the drive is basically done for. But hey, the warranty is still valid! Yay!

 

Thanks for reading, pleave leave any input and/or questions below!  (Hope my explanation and all was extensive enough , sorry for bad english)

[Rainbrew]

Thank you for referring to me as a "fella" made me oddly happy. I had a similar problem on my laptop and in that case it was some very odd problem with Windows 10 notifications causing abnormal drive activity. Task manager did not indicate what was causing it but after turning the notifications from windows off the problem was solved immediately. On my main rig however I still have no idea what was happening but the problem magically solved itself after 6 hours of trying to fix it and I still have no clue what the issue was on that system and can only hope it doesn't reappear. Hope this one gets figured out soon mate, cheers!

[Blake]

-snip-

Windows has made corrections to the file system.

-snip-

Give 

sfc /scannow

a go.

[pow3rran9er]

Give 

sfc /scannow

a go.

C:\WINDOWS\system32>sfc /scannowBeginning system scan.  This process will take some time.Beginning verification phase of system scan.Verification 100% complete.Windows Resource Protection did not find any integrity violations.

Thank you for referring to me as a "fella" made me oddly happy. I had a similar problem on my laptop and in that case it was some very odd problem with Windows 10 notifications causing abnormal drive activity. Task manager did not indicate what was causing it but after turning the notifications from windows off the problem was solved immediately. On my main rig however I still have no idea what was happening but the problem magically solved itself after 6 hours of trying to fix it and I still have no clue what the issue was on that system and can only hope it doesn't reappear. Hope this one gets figured out soon mate, cheers!

 

Haha no problem, well so far no luck on my part I already tried turning off the windows 10 notifications, didn't seem to have any impact at all.

[pow3rran9er]

For anyone having the same problems: It's most certainly a hard drive failure.

 

Even though the SMART values are still perfectly fine and the drive sometimes works, it will constantly break and only get worse. 

 

At a certain point my PC froze due to memory issues whilst running Just Cause 3 (Probably because it was performing disk check stuff in the background)

Had to shut it down improperly causing windows boot files to get corrupted, so I re-installed windows again (found that simpler then attempting repairs) and took the drive out, haven't had a problem since.

 

My warranty on the disk is still valid though so I should be fine