Yeah, the (incredible) Samsung EVO 850 drives are VERY fast and not too expensive, $90 for a 250GB and $147 for a 500GB. I recommend them. Probably be best to be prepared- I imagine 6 years ago when you got your SSD the tech hadn’t quite advanced to the point where they could write as much data before losing … whatever SSD’s lose when they start dying, so it does seem the most likely outcome. These new drives can write a CRAZY amount of data before they start showing signs of failure, and should last a VERY long time (and as prices keep dropping and backup methods get easier and easier to implement, replacing them every 6-8 years or whatever isn’t a big deal).
Grab a new drive, back everything up, and get a fresh install of Windows 10 on a new SSD - I think you’ll breath a lot easier.
Is it possible it’s a bad power supply? The DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE sounds like something that might happen if power to the drive were interrupted (although a quick google seems to indicate it’s almost always a bad driver that’s at fault). Did sfc /scannow return any results?
I’m still betting it is actually the controller chip that is going bad on the SSD. Sounds intermittent at the moment, but eventually it will go completely. As Aleck said, back up the disk asap, and ghost it onto a new drive. SSDs are dirt cheap these days up to even 480s.
I was thinking of the order of operations for what I need to do when it arrives. Let’s see:
Using Macrium Reflect, I made an image of my C: drive and put it on my E: drive, and made an emergency USB stick too.
I can’t disconnect my old C: drive since that has windows on it, right? So I could disconnect my D: drive to put in the new Samsung drive I guess.
Then I boot up and install Windows 10 on the new formatted drive somehow? Maybe there’s a special boot mode I can go into using one of the flash drives I have?
And then I can disconnect my old C: drive, and reconnect my old D: drive in its place. I don’t have any spare power connections or SATA cables so I have disconnect something to connect something new.
Throw away old C: drive.
Profit!
I guess that’s still a very confused plan. I need to work on it. Any thoughts?
Btw, I had that DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE blue screen twice more yesterday. So I really hope this is the right solution, replacing the hard drive.
I would recommend grabbing something like this. Boot up, connect the new drive via the usb cable, restore the Macrium reflect image (or use Samsung’s software to mirror the existing drive). Shut down. Remove old drive. Install new drive. Reboot!
Sometimes there’s some weirdness about the boot partition not being marked as the active partition – you can correct that (IIRC) using a USB boot disk with a couple easy command line entries.
Even if it’s not the right solution, replacing your 6 year old SSD is probably the right move regardless. And doing it while it’s in a state to safely migrate the data is always a plus, of course, as well. However, I’m very confident this will resolve your pesky issue!
The Samsung drive should be waiting for me when I get home from work today.
A couple of new symptoms to mention. I went to Qt3 this morning using firefox. Then I fired up Dark Souls 2 for an hour, and after I quit, the firefox shortcut said “hey, this file no longer exists, do you want to delete this shortcut?” What? Firefox no longer exists? I went searching through the C: drive, and sure enough, the whole Program Files (x86) folder was gone under the WindowsOld.000 folder.
So that strengthens the hard drive going bad theory.
Here’s another symptom though. I noticed yesterday that after this fresh Install of Windows 10, there’s something missing. My DVD ROM drive is not a drive listed under “This PC”. When I go to device manager, it does list the DVDROM as one of the hardware, with updated drivers and the hardware working properly. So that just left me confused. Is that just windows messing up and not mounting the drive properly when installing Windows? Or could it be a sign that this is somehow power-supply related or motherboard related? Hmmm. We shall see.
Hopefully tonight I can swap out to the new drive, and all will be fixed.
Phew. That took a looooong time and a lot of steps. But two and a half hours later, I’m done, and running off the Samsung drive as my C: drive, back from the clone image I made on Aleck’s urging two days ago. All the data I’d been losing the last couple of days is back. I’m not sure if I lost something before those two days ago, when I made that image on Aleck’s urging upthread. But at least I have everything that I had up to that point. By the time I got home and booted up the drive, out of over 60 GB occupied out of 74Gb drive, I was down to 30GB and losing data fast.
I’m kind of happy that my drive was losing data and destroying itself like the Langoliers or something, slowly eating away, instead of failing too spectacularly. I guess I’m lucky.
Now the waiting begins. There’s no doubt that the disk was bad. I should know in the next day or two if that was the only problem as long as I don’t get any more blue screen failures.
I was looking at Tom’s Qt3 stream, and had to go downstairs for dinner, so I shut firefox. After dinner, I came back and just like on the old C: drive, it was down to only 30 Gb. Firefox and whole host of other stuff on the C: drive was just gone.
I’m kind of stumped right now. A nasty virus? That I brought with me from the old drive to the new one?
Some other kind of hardware problem from the motherboard?
Speaking of other hardware, a day or two ago there was this weird tone/noise like the kind of noise you’d hear from a PC speaker back in the old days if you didn’t have a sound card. That kind of noise I heard coming briefly from my PC somewhere.
And I’m hearing it right now as I type this, suddenly. Like an obsessed computer that’s trying to communicate with me from beyond the grave. Sometimes it’s on, sometimes off. If only I knew morse code.
Oh wait, now it’s stopped for now.
So bizarre. Any ideas gents?
EDIT: Thinking it might be virus related, I had installed AVG Pro Trial and was running a full check. And the virus checker is currently checking my D: drive. I wonder if that’s what’s causing this incessant noise? It’s accessing certain parts of the HDD that are causing the noise maybe?
Yeah, I usually only ever see those on boot-up too.
Well, leaving aside the beeps for now, I was thinking about the disappearing files in the Windows.Old.000 folder. Maybe it’s just a Windows 10 process. A certain amount of time after a fresh Windows installation, maybe it starts deleting files from the older Windows folder automatically.
The only thing the virus checker found was tracking cookies.
So at this point, I’m just downloading new programs as needed. Downloaded and installed Firefox and Chrome again, instead of running them from the Windows.Old folder (since that’s mostly all gone).
So the disappearing files it seems had nothing to do with the failing hard drive, if that’s what I had. But that doesn’t mean the old blue screens weren’t caused by the hard drive either.
I myself would have done a fresh install of windows 10 on the new drive, instead of copying back over an image of windows that you aren’t sure has issues or not. That would at least confirm it to be a hardware problem of some sort if it continued.
You can also try starting an admin command prompt (right click on windows button for it) and run this at the command line:
sfc /scannow
It will check and fix any corrupted windows files if there are any.
I did the sfc /scannow command, nothing bad was detected.
I noticed on the old drive after installing fresh Windows 10 that when it went to sleep (I always used to turn sleep mode off previously in Windows 7 and similarly with 10, since I never changed settings), after waking up from sleep it had the best chance of doing the DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE blue screen. So I tried that today. It went to sleep, and sure enough, after waking up, same blue screen. Hmmm.
Now, I’ve turned sleep mode back off, so I’m not concerned about that part, but it could be another symptom of the larger problem.
I haven’t had any other problems on my PC since the fresh new drive, but I do still have this noise coming on that sounds like a weird PC speaker sound coming from my PC.
Here’s what I noticed recently:
Noise only comes when I play intense games.
But wait! Noise also comes when I’m streaming too many things to my PC.
Therefore, maybe it has something to do with CPU usage? Sure enough, I was downloading the DiRT Rally update this morning from Steam, and my CPU usage was above 60%, and the noise was loud and proud throughout that process. And if I paused the download, and the CPU usage went down, the noise stopped.
So I’m pretty sure that awful noise is tied to CPU usage. The DOOM demo also made the noise go crazy. So I figure, maybe something is stuck in the CPU fan? And when the fan goes to high speed, the noise starts coming? I don’t know, the CPU fan is it even tied to CPU usage? I don’t know. Maybe it’s something on the chip itself. It certainly sounds like some kind of warning beep that’s constantly going, but it could be a noise made by the fan too, vibrating at a certain frequency.
Hmmm. Ideas on next step? Open the case, breath onto the CPU to try to blow dust off it?
Yeah, sounds like a fan thing to me. I had what I thought was a drive-related noise on my old machine, which turned out to be cruft on one of the fan blades. Or as Rich says it could be more permanent damage to the fan. You should be regularly clearing dust out of your case anyway, so see if it helps.
