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*FIXED* File Corruption -- It's driving me nuts, any help would be greatly appreciated

C

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Senior member
Hello, I'm having this insane file corruption issues with my PC, I've tested memory, scanned for viruses, tested CPU, scanned my HD, replaced NICs, replaced dsl modem with cable modem when I switched ISPs, wiped windows xp partition and reinstalled it all over, nothing hellps. When I'm downloading large files, they all come out corrupted. I had to redownload half life patch which is like 80 megs like 5 times by the time I got a successful install. I've redownloaded AmericasArmy like 10 times now (650 megs each download) and every single one of those downloads gave me a "bad crc: possible transer error" when I tried to install it. I would greatly appreciate any input at all on this porblem. I'm am not a novice user and am very experienced and majored in software engineering. At this point I've done everything I could think off and think that it could possibly be my motherboard.

Here are my specs:
WINXP pro with service pac 1 on NTFS partition
AMD Athlon XP 1600+ -- NOT OVERCLOCKED -- tested with prime95
Epox 8k9a VIA KT400 mobo -- latest via 4 in 1 drivers installed, before reformat I had an older drivers installed
Albatron GeForce 4 TI4200
512MB 2700 DDR -- NOT OVERCLOCKED, checked with memtest86 overnight, 30 passes, 0 errors
WD 120GB SE Hard Drive -- every sector checked with WD diagnostics utility
TB Santa Cruz sound card
3COM NIC -- replaced it with D-LINK NIC, same problem
No router is beeing used.


I've ahd this PC for more than a year but this problem showed up only recently, within the last couple months.

It seems to me now, the problem may not even have anything to do with downloading, but large files in general. It's really hard to say and it's driving me crazy. Do you guys know of a good diagnostics software out there that will be able to test all the motherboard components effectively? Like PCI and IDE, ect?

BTW, I've also posted this at da Shack here:
http://www.shacknews.com/ja.zz?id=9114477
They had a lot of good suggestions, but nothing helped.

Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.
 
I had a similar problem, and it was a bad memory stick. At that point, I had 2 sticks, so removing one let the system run, but corruption went away. Memtest couldn't find that. <fwiw>
 
Have you checked in the EVENT LOG for clue to the write errors?

How much of the drive space is used?

Also, do you have "IDE PreFetch mode" enabled in the BIOS?
If so, try disabling as that can cause drive errors.
 
Horsepower: Great idea, I happen to have two memory sticks. I'll check it out and let you guys know.

LiLithTecH: I have a lot of partitions, on WinXP partition I have around 3GB free disk space. Overall I am probably using about 70-80% of total HD space right now, so maybe 40GB of free space. I will test out your "IDE prefetch mode" theory as soon as I can and let you know.
 
LiLithTecH, I'll be damned. Hot damn, I think you're on to something there buddy. Decided to try your suggestion first because it was less work (god knows I'm sick of this computer already) and what do you know, two consecutive downloads of AA and both work. I must've downloaded AA 10 times before and every single download had his own crc error. I will do further testing by enabling IDE Prefetch Mode and see if file corruption returns.

If in fact that's what was causing the problem, it makes me look like a dumb ass now cus look what it says here in my motherboard manual:

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

IDE Prefetch Mode

Selecting Enabled reduces latency between each drive read/write cycle, but may cause instability in IDE subsystems that cannot support such fast performance. If you are getting disk drive errors, try setting this value to Disabled.

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

I knew I should've gone through my bios manual and test out every setting, but never got around to it.

Hmm, I didn't use to have this problem, it started happening all of a sudden couple months ago. I noticed my large downloads were corrupted and I was having difficulties installing my game CDs due to CRC installation errors. I thought my CDs must've been scratched.

Now I wonder why the hell it didn't happen before, and why is it a problem now cus I have a pretty fast IDE HD which is only like 6-8 months old.
Could it be because I never defragmented it (hell, it's fast), and over time it got so fragmented that it couldn't keep up with this Prefetch Mode when writing to disk? I dunno, this is strange.

Tnx for you time everybody, I will keep on testing now 🙂
 
Well, I enabled Prefetch Mode again and guess what? Everything's working fine. No corruptions, nada. Guess something wrong was with BIOS. I don't have backup power supply and this rain season we had quite a few split second power outages and I guess one of those power outages messed up the BIOS and everything went to normal after I resaved the BIOS today. You guys ever heard about such thing or am I full of bs?

Anyway, everything is working fine now, thanx for your time.
 
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