Windows 10 "Restart to repair drive errors" AFTER replacing drive...twice?

[blondebear]

@DPRK

He or she did completely replace the drive…

He did

@LSLGuy

Your PC is “haunted” by a latent defect. Give it to a landfill and get another one. That’s the only real cure.

I did get a new laptop, which freed me to mess around with the old one without fear of screwing something up.

Still running memtest86+, no errors detected so far.

[LSLGuy]

@DPRK

He or she did completely replace the drive, so the problem was not the disk controller. Could have been anything else… I am a strong believer in filesystems that provide hierarchical checksumming of all data and metadata, especially if dealing with terabytes or more.

I was talking about a component upstream of the replaceable parts. Something integral to the mobo.

[blondebear]

Well, I ran memtest86+ for about a day and a half with no errors reported. I booted back to Windows a couple of hours ago and haven’t seen any disk error notifications…yet. Who knows, it might pop up in a few minutes, or in another year. There’s a gremlin or ghost in the machine somewhere and I’ve spent enough time trying to track it down and exorcise it.

The laptop has served me well for many years, but I’ve decided to move on. I’ll probably keep it to use for a media server or something.

Thanks everyone for your feedback!

[Voyager]

@LSLGuy

I was talking about a component upstream of the replaceable parts. Something integral to the mobo.

I agree with this. If you replace something multiple times, and you still get failures, it is not in the thing you replaced. There is a lot of logic between the disk and the CPU. Most memories also have error correction, so it being bad enough to corrupt windows more than once boggles the imagination.
It sounds like this machine is old enough so that defects showing up in an ASIC is not beyond the bounds of possibilities.
I don’t know if there are Windows error logs you can look at somewhere, but try to find them. If there is a memory error you’d see tons of corrected errors being logged before it got bad enough to corrupt anything.

[BigT]

@Voyager

I don’t know if there are Windows error logs you can look at somewhere, but try to find them. If there is a memory error you’d see tons of corrected errors being logged before it got bad enough to corrupt anything. ⁢

It’s called the Event viewer, and you can type that into the Start Menu to launch it. Then look under Custom View > Administrator Events to see the stuff that is most likely to have been a problem.

It has a lot of stuff in it, though, so I’d wait until you get the error to check.

[Voyager]

Thanks. I have used it a long time ago when some antivirus software was preventing my machine from booting.
IIRC it keeps error reports for a while, and if this is a memory problem there should be tons of reports about it. When I worked for a large company making servers, we had some flaky memory chips for a while, and we got our users to turn off reports on corrected memory errors because they were getting flooded with them.
I don’t think he’s going to see anything, though. Worth checking.