BSOD - Stop: 0x000000F4
Community Forums/General Help/BSOD - Stop: 0x000000F4
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| Getting this a hell of a lot yesterday and today on my laptop. Google search hasn't turned up a lot, though many people seem to suggest hard drive problems. This theory is backed up by the fact that I am not getting a crash dump file (it can't write it if the hard drive has gone tits-up for some reason). Thoughts? |
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| Hard to say, a lot of those blue screen codes are more voodoo than science... Have you looked at your harddrive's S.M.A.R.T. info? Certain drive problems will show up in there... e.g. download HDTune, select your drive, and look at the 'health' tab - it will give an overall health status for the drive. Although do note that there can be other issues that may not show up: e.g. controller / motherboard problems, driver problems, bad memory (which can lead to all kinds of mystery problems that may be atributed to other components), power problems, etc. I had a bunch of random blue screens on my PC in recent weeks, which went away when I underclocked my memory to 1333 MHz instead of its advertised 1600 MHz. |
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| Well, swapped out the hard drive and it's been stable for the last hour or so now, whereas before it was dying every ten minutes. Looks like my SSD is dead at this stage, but I'll keep an eye on it. |
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| Are SSD's more likely to brick than standard HD's? |
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| Are SSD's more likely to brick than standard HD's? Statistically, they're more reliable... No moving parts after all. |
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| So statistically others will benefit from a death of GFK's hdd :p. If you are able to replace a hdd, you may also have the hdd attached as a secondary drive (or with a sata/ide-to-usb adapter) so you could check with chkdsk/badblocks/... bye Ron |
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| Bad blocks work different on SSD -- gets re-allocated automagically behind the scenes by the controller chipset, there's typically ~10-15% 'spare' sectors. It's unlikely that you'll actually see any marked bad with checkdisk. |
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| Well, the drive itself is an odd beast. I have two of them, identical drives. One in my development PC which has operated flawlessly for about 18 months, and one in my laptop, which has died on its arse within four months. I bought it because it was going pretty cheap in PC World due to it being outdated by the Agility 4. As I said, the drives are absolutely identical - 2.5" OCZ Agility 3 SATA III 120GB. The drive in my development PC has firmware 1.25, upgraded from 1.23. The recently deceased drive has firmware 1.24, which is not upgradeable to 1.25. 1.25 is the latest firmware available (I had this issue before with my dev PC, and a firmware upgrade solved it). So I'm now back to a cruddy 5400RPM HDD in my laptop, which is reliable thus far, but slower than an asthmatic ant with some heavy shopping. So, still not entirely happy and I don't fancy buying another SSD of a different brand. Was saying to my missus last night I should ditch this bloody computer lark once and for all and take up something less problematic, like fishing or collecting commemorative teaspoons. :/ |
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| Statistically, they're more reliable… However, when it goes, it drops dead, unlike an HDD, which usually gives signs of going before it dies, so you have a chance of getting stuff off the HDD. |
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| Well, I could not tolerate being back on a slow HDD (I tried, and lasted for almost a whole day) so I just picked up a Samsung 840 Pro SSD; 128GB, 390MB/s write, 530MB/s read, and importantly for a laptop, it only uses 0.3w of power at idle. I'll be keeping the box and receipt for this one, though. |
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| one day I might go SSD but atm im still with HDD, I try to go by how a particular game plays on standard hardware so HDD is a requirement :D |
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| However, when it goes, it drops dead, unlike an HDD, which usually gives signs of going before it dies, so you have a chance of getting stuff off the HDD Actually, it depends on what the problem is -- Depending on the error, SSD can also fail gracefully in that it may mark (parts of) the drive read-only when it finds it can't reliably write anymore... Allowing you to still copy your data off to a different drive. (Of course both SSD and HDD have a chance of the controller board itself giving out completely, in which case they are both instant paperweights) |
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| Mine was starting up fine, then after a couple of minutes the system would hang, followed by a BSOD 1-2 minutes later. But after the BSOD I don't think it could recognise the HD as there was no crash dump. New one is running great now. I've emailed OCZ in the meantime to see if I can wangle a replacement. I've sort of lost faith in OCZ SSD's, though, so I'll wait to see how they handle it. But even if I get a replacement I can't see it going into any of my PCs, because there's now a trust issue. [edit] Just put the SSD as secondary drive in my desktop PC and run a disk check (lol, 'dick check', I just typed!) - Always got about 50,000 files into a file scan before the drive failed. Still shows up in Computer, can still get properties for it, but available space is zero, used space is zero. Methinks it is as dead as some doo-doos. |
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| thought they give 10 years of warranty on such devices, no? |
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| Not sure on the OCZ, but the new Samsung one has a five year warranty. |
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| Sounds like its overheating whack a desk fan blowing cold air onto it and see if it helps |
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| It won't help. The drive is failing at exactly the same point during chkdsk. Its just a bad drive. Googling it reveals i'm not alone. |
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| 10 years seems high for a warranty on a device with much less longevity than a traditional hard drive. I won't trust a SSD device with my archived data. Flash drives are okay though but they are a different than a high performance SSD. If you have a lot of ram a ramdisk solution will be faster than any SSD you can buy. |
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| Well, OCZ replaced the drive for me. Even though I have no use for the new one because I already bought a new Samsung one. So, that's something, even though FedEx made a complete arse of the delivery - claimed they came and I wasn't in (I was in all day, they just couldn't find the house), and the hard drive then sat in the delivery depot for four days before the attempted delivery again. Seriously, if you ever need to dispose of evidence of criminal activity (drugs, merchandise, dead bodies), just send it to somebody by FedEx. It'll never be seen again. |
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| Seriously, if you ever need to dispose of evidence of criminal activity (drugs, merchandise, dead bodies), just send it to somebody by FedEx. It'll never be seen again. Where I live, FedEx is the best, UPS is the worst and the post office is slightly better than UPS. |
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