Corrputed files, and it seems HD.

[phao]

Hi.

Recently, a friend of mine lended me his WoW (World of Warcraft) instalation CD. And I tried to install it. Got errors while installing (error on a installer's data file). Then I thought "problem with his cd", but then I got my other's friend CD and had same problem.

Then, this other friend of mine tried giving me his installed WoW (copied from program files folder). It runs, but crashes a lot for the same problem of corrupted files.

Then I had the idea of downloading a WoW installer torrent. Programs like utorrent can check hoe much % of a torrent I have and download only the missing parts. I did that: It veryfied that I had 98.7% of WoW. Then I figured "some files got corrupted during the copy", but I was starting figuring there was something wrong already. Aftering downloading the missing part and getting 100% of wow, I run a "re-check" on my torrent program, expecting it to find 100% of WoW now, since I've downloaded it. But no. I got some other value different from 100%. I re-checked many times and re-downloaded many times: it never gets to 100%.

Then I tried running chkdisk -- a guy on IRC told me that this kind of problem could happen because of a filesystem problem. went to my two partitions properties menu and used the error checking tool (front-end to chkdisk) -- selected the two options for fixing problems and runned it -- first for the main partition, then for the backup one.

Nothing was fixed.

A curious thing is that this kind of stuff happens only on wow (maybe because it's a big set of files -- easy to corrupt on a damaged system [mine]).

The DVDs containing WoW's instalation are still here, and they have no problem because the first friend of mine, owner of the dvds, used tem to show me that the dvds were OK.

Any clues on how to fix that (honestly, I don't even know very well which is the problem) -- maybe some tests to try to find out what is wrong?

Yesterday, I downloaded java twice with firefox, both files were corrupted, then I downloaded with wget (for those who don't know, this is a "web/ftp downloader for the command line" commonly used in linux, but there is a windowss version), and the file was fine (I had problems with firefox corrupting files before, but twice in a row, never). Maybe this has something to do with the problem.

Any clues?

I Run Windows XP SP2 (PT-BR language) -- During install I had zero problems.

[MANEMAN]

Hi, Wow ! you've got some problems there.

First of all update to SP3. Then make another partition, install a disk imaged copy of your original install on the the new partition so that you can dual boot XP. With your disk imaging software you will now easily be able to boot and also re-image from within the Windows environment. this is going to give you more scope to experiment with various files.

As we do not know what other software applications (Apps) you have loaded on your computer it is almost impossible to do a diagnosis for things like DLL conflicts that may be occuring within the environment you are using.

In fact I would say it is impossible to diagnose by remote once you start downloading torrents which could be questionable if the original hash is not quoted, or there has been corruption in the download.

Without you carrying out the instructions in the first paragraph (and preferably with a clean install) I dont think we would be able to help you.

Do come back when you have it all working again so that others may learn from your efforts.

John.

[phao]

Hi, Wow ! you've got some problems there.

First of all update to SP3. Then make another partition, install a disk imaged copy of your original install on the the new partition so that you can dual boot XP. With your disk imaging software you will now easily be able to boot and also re-image from within the Windows environment. this is going to give you more scope to experiment with various files.

As we do not know what other software applications (Apps) you have loaded on your computer it is almost impossible to do a diagnosis for things like DLL conflicts that may be occuring within the environment you are using.

In fact I would say it is impossible to diagnose by remote once you start downloading torrents which could be questionable if the original hash is not quoted, or there has been corruption in the download.

Without you carrying out the instructions in the first paragraph (and preferably with a clean install) I dont think we would be able to help you.

Do come back when you have it all working again so that others may learn from your efforts.

John.

Thanks John.

I can do that, almost actually. Some time ago, I've installed SP3 here, and the computer got really slow. I really don't wanna go back to that.

About other apps and torrents. I only did the WoW torrent: nothing else. This windows instalation I have here is recent (2 days). I only installed firefox, pidgin, wget, ychat (xchat for windows), utorrent, the drivers on my mobo cdrom, notepad++, foxit pdf reader, teamspeak, chicken (scheme programming language implementation), jdk, jre and mingw.

The install looks clean. Never had any of those weird start-up errors.

About this part

Then make another partition, install a disk imaged copy of your original install on the the new partition so that you can dual boot XP. With your disk imaging software you will now easily be able to boot and also re-image from within the Windows environment. this is going to give you more scope to experiment with various files.

I have no clue how to do this. I'm a linux user kinda new to windows. Do you know any tutorial on that?

[MANEMAN]

You can find disk imaging tutorials * HERE *

I've never had a computer with XP that has slowed up after installing SP3, so I dont know quite what you may have done wrong there.

John. :)

[phao]

Nothing wrong actually. It's just that this computer isn't much fast.

But, thx for your help. I switched back to linux, and the file corruption problem persists. It's probably something outside windows' control, or something it did that affected somehow, some part of, the computer.

[phao]

Well... Not much happy to post this here. The "using torrent as a way to get the missing pieces of the installer" technique worked on linux. I'm guessing Windows XP SP2 may have problems with the Gigabyte mother board.

[bludgard]

One way to test this theory would be to crate a partiotion and completely wipe and fully format it.Then you know that the drive is clean.Try saving the file to this partition.

EDIT:Who uses any OS without critical updates?

[phao]

One way to test this theory would be to crate a partiotion and completely wipe and fully format it.Then you know that the drive is clean.Try saving the file to this partition.

EDIT:Who uses any OS without critical updates?

About linux -- maybe I'm wrong. What I can tell is that the "torrent-thing" worked.

About using an O.S. w/o update. It's probably a linux thing. I update regularly here (in linux, there is a package manager, which handles all the packages on your system -- it's very uncommon to download packages somewhere else), but the updates are new versions of packages, and sometimes, new versions of the kernel.

Windows update kinda updates parts of the system, configuration files, and stuff like that. This kind of update is not much common on linux.

Linux was crated by geeks, as much as I like windows, sometimes, it's inevitable for me to think that MS releases stuff w/o being testes properly for $$ reasons. Linux development is kinda different: there are many branches, and some famous ones (like Linus'). People get the branch they want, and use it. It's not about the linux team releasing, it's about others getting.

But anyway, I don't actually think the problem was on windows. As I told you, the only thing I can tell is that the "torrent-fix" worked here on linux. I'm still getting corrupted files, just that I'm doing with much less frequency. I'm running some tools to check the health of the HD.

If you're curious about the tools: sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki

But it's too bad. I'm not sure I have fuel to try the whole thing again on windows (I'm not that patient). I was enjoying using it back again.

Sometimes I think the whole problem is this computer. It's "old", but I know it works because I've seen it doing. When I get a new one, this will all go away. But then, I remember older computers I had. This one is 3 years. My older one was 6 years old, and I didn't have problems. The older one had an asus mobo and a pentium 4. This one has a gigabyte mobo and a Celeron 430 (not much sure if that's the right number). I've heard that windows has problems with mobo different from asus, but ... how knows?

Thx for help folks.

[phao]

Sorry about the flooding, but the hd check tools just resulted.

They found 32 errors on my HD. It seems that the solution is to buy a new one.

This is one error found in the log:

Error 32 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 1764 hours (73 days + 12 hours)

When the command that caused the error occurred, the device was active or idle.

After command completion occurred, registers were:

ER ST SC SN CL CH DH

-- -- -- -- -- -- --

04 51 40 00 00 00 a0 Error: ABRT

Commands leading to the command that caused the error were:

CR FR SC SN CL CH DH DC Powered_Up_Time Command/Feature_Name

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- ---------------- --------------------

c6 00 40 00 00 00 a0 04 00:02:16.000 SET MULTIPLE MODE

91 00 40 00 00 00 af ff 00:02:16.000 INITIALIZE DEVICE PARAMETERS [OBS-6]

10 00 00 00 00 00 a0 ff 00:02:16.000 RECALIBRATE [OBS-4]

ec 00 01 01 00 00 a0 04 00:02:16.000 IDENTIFY DEVICE

ec 00 01 01 00 00 a0 04 00:02:15.000 IDENTIFY DEVICE

I think buying a new HD should solve this problem.

After all, it seems that windows had nothing to do with the problem, =).

[bludgard]

You could try to low level format the drive with the tool specifically designed for the drive provided by the drives manufacturer.This will in a lot of cases restore the drive as if it were new.I have used this low level formatting a couple of times on machines that are older than 13 years with amazing results.

As an aside,there are many Linux users on this Forum.I for one multi-boot my main machine:Win 7,XP SP3,Ubuntu 10.10,DSL 2.4.31.Not to mention what I run on VirtualBox VM-another 3 OSs.:lol:

Last night I tried to install Slackware 1.3 and screwed up the whole HD!:0

Glad I created a full backup image with Clonezilla the previous day.I now have it all back.;)

Stick around,phao.You are in good company.B)

One

[phao]

Thx. Since I concluded this is a hardware problem, needing a replacement to fix, I took my computer to a computer store in my town that fixes that kind of problem.

Off Topic: I kinda like windows because it seems, as strange as this may sound, more technical (maybe that's because I see [as in they have a GUI] all those programs for management on windows). People say linux is hard to use, which is kinda true, but once you get the hang of it, there aren't many technicalities anymore -- it's kinda easy to settle. I've been using archlinux for 4 years, and the most technical I had to get in the past year was typing "pacman -Syu" on the command line to update the whole system. Back when I was on slckware 10.1, I used to struggle **a lot** with package dependencies. I like linux for the command line (combining commands with command line pipes is like playing with toys to me), and for the programming environment, but I don't think it's an interesting system in an "informatics" view point. I never had to get into this more technical part of linux, which isn't LINUX per say, but this part seems obscure (I've stumbled with many manuals on configuring windows, but I've never seen manuals actually explaining what all those configuration files on /etc do -- the man pages are great for programs, libraries and syscalls documentations, but I don't think they're so great for those files). ArchLinux automates much of the struggle, which is pkg management. It's a cool system, but I don't think it's interesting in an administration point of view.