SL Crashes affecting hard drive?

Have always experienced crashes on sl since joining. Yesterday, my computer froze up while in sl. I got an error message about kernels and a memory dump. This required several runs of diagnostic, changing setting, & numerous reboots. Today I logged in and my computer crashed yet again. the blue screen of death with a message stating that my hard drive has errors. at least one installed program has been damaged.

What the hell is going on? Is there a "fix" for this?

I've moved this to the right place--Technical Issues--creola.

SL itself should not do this--the times I've seen it happen, quite frequently there was a preexisting problem with the computer's hardware, such as improper powering... which already made it quite unstable, and SL adds on top of that because it will use your SL quite intensely.

You can also contact support with more details for assistance, i.e. your computer's specs, other info that's relevant.

The very thing that happened to Creola Deledda, happened to me yesterday too. I was logged in and crashed a few times then got the blue screen and had to reinstall my OS.
I wouldn't have thought it had anything todo with SL, until I saw Creola's Post. I'm still not sure it does, but seems like an odd Coincidence.

I've merged your posts together in a single thread.

Harddrives dont last forever, some new ones i had died after a month, usually pretty long warrany, so long you can return it and they dont even have it on store, so 100% money back or a new one wich is usually bigger ;p

Um yeh SL acess harddrive alot, so it can be really stressfull especially if you dont have much ram then its constant grind fest wich can lead to drive failure (wonder how many ibm hd's i killed in my lifetime :q)

What i do for my C: (wich sl has cache on anyhoo) is defrag least once in a week, never install games/sound/movies on it, pure program/operating system, and dont have a variable swap drive, set both to 1 size instead of min / max

As I had said, I don't truly believe that SL caused my OS to become corrupt, but it seemed like an odd coincidence.

I know that there was and is nothing wrong with my computer, or my power. My computer is plugged in to a very new and large Battery backup (very clean and stable power).

Also the harddrive(s) are not an issue I have a 5 disk SCSI raid array (raid5).

My computer is a Dell Poweredge 2800 Server (less then six months old) that I use as a workstation (windows XP). It has dual 3.6ghz xeon processors and 8 gigs of Ram, 256mb PCI-express video card.

Believe me, there was nothing wrong with my computer when it happened.

I'm still not convinced SL caused the glitch I just thought I'd post because I saw Creola's Post.

What ever you do with a severely munged Windows disk don't run chkdsk on it and allow it to "automatically fix errors" unless you want it to be less recoverable than it already is.

I'd be really hard pressed to blame SL for eating your windows disk, the strongest case I think one could make is that SL uncovers a bug in your video driver which scribbles on the hard disk driver which then corrupts the logical structure of your drive. I think the "hard drive failed on its own" hypothesis is much more likely.

This is personal experience only, take with five grains of salt - I have found Veritas to be very competent in at-home recovery of recoverable data (they were recently bought by symantec) there seems to be a try-before-buy version which I suspect tells you what you might be able to recover and then for US$100 it will let you recover it (just guessing). Once a drive goes kablooey on you, never, ever trust it again. Modern on-drive controllers "hide" bad sectors from you and can make a 10% failed disk look fine; if your drive is in this state, it will almost certainly get worse over time. Finally, I have found more failures on Maxtor drives than any other amongst myself and the friends who call me when they have drives die on them; this could be a statistical anomaly (i.e. bad luck), but I won't purchase any more from them.

Finally, if your drive is making audible screeching noises you may well have a head crash in which case prospects are dismal unless you must shell out $1000+ to have it taken apart in a clean room and have them salvage what they can.

Good luck.

Awesome setup, Spankers. I guess your monster system sort of quashes the standard LL reply of, "Gosh, it must be your itty-bitty, underpowered system that is causing your performance problems and crashes.... golly, gee it surely could not be us. Please call Support and they will help you with your system problems." Hmmm....perhaps you could offer up some of your server resources and help them out.

I too, run a huge dual desktop system with super fast broadband connection. So, I know it is not really problems on my side of the client/server relationship with SL, other than the simply horrible connectivity issues associated with the San Fransico area internet backbone servers. Probably some of the most problemmatic routing issues and unstable speeds in the country. The weakest link theory is alive and well when is comes to streaming data. The Atlanta internet backbone servers simply rock, BTW. I have some testing results from across the U.S., but that is for another thread, or IM's.

Would be interested in learning what SL Support says about your system, and your personal SL performance experience. We can trade stats. I'll show you mine, if you show me yours.

And, yes, SL can really pound a HD if the system does not have a great deal of RAM. Plus, I have noticed events when the SL stream seems to belch forth a huge bolus of data that has on occassion crashed my SL client, dropped the cable connection, and forced a reboot of the entire system - including the modem. (I routinely call Comcast when this happens. Comcast has confirmed on every occassion that they have seen 'something' happen with my connection and modem during these events. Not a Comcast outage, not a node issue, only me. On a couple of occassions Comcast even had to re-initialize my modem from their side in order to re-establish my cable connection.) And, no, I don't think it is just coincidence that this all happens only when connected to SL. Something is coming from the outside and it can crash your system - or maybe even worse for people with less robust systems, as in the cases of people having to re-install the OS or even toasting the HD entirely.

Oh well, lest we forget that Linden Research, Inc. is afterall, a 'development' company. SL is in many, many ways still Beta. And we be the lab rats.

HEY, who moved my cheese!!!

Take care and have fun with that system.

I too think the cause is underlying failure of the HD, I've had HDs that were brand new die within days of installation. Though another possibility exists. The blue screen that appears should have some sort of driver name and 0x0~ code, if you see such jot it down and check out Microsoft's Support site, granted stuff is written by tech geeks but it'll give you a direction of where to look.

I've recently solved my own issue of SL going whackadinghoy and crashing by updating my video drivers, as I went into edit appearance SL would crash to the desktop.

Also check to see if your CPU and video cards are clear of any wires or debris, sometimes little case gremlins move inside cables into the reach of fan blades and bring those to a stop resulting in overheating.

My last video card, an eVGA GeForce 6200 Fanless Solution card kept overheating and rebooting the system.

In My case I believe the likely problem is the Windows XP operating system. My 5 Drives are fine. When you have a poweredge 2800 it comes with every single diagnostics system known to man, Believe me the drives are fine.

As far as stray wires in the case, have you seen the inside of a 2800, there is not an inch of unsecured wire.

Debris inside the case, you don't spend 10000.00 dollars on a computer to use as a desktop and allow even a speck of dust inside of it or out.

On the blue screen, it flashed so fast couldn't read any of it, on reboot, it said, No OS found.

Like I said the problem is likely the combination of Windows XP, an SL not playing nicely.

well... heres one. until i read this i couldnt understand butperhaps sl is grinding the hard drives. my hard drive failed last week. same bsod but it was onrevoverable.
my son who has an account as well on the same day had a bsod unrecoverable constant stop erros finally doing the same as mine and clckig.
2 days laater i go to my mother inlaws and show her son on a new pc second life. he was on it for 12 hours solid. and guess what... bsod. had to get a new hd. and also a new grafix card.
the pc shop reair it was directly related to sl.. (the grafix car) apparently through the bios and fecked hd.

so has anyone else experienced. this.. could it be put down to unusally long periods of sl.
any one got any stats of what sl does to hd. does it constantly rwrite textures to it delte them ect..

i had something similar happen, where i was in SL and had my hd do the whole cd in the microwave thing, i didn't really mind all that much, it was an old hd and needed to be replaced anyway. i doubt very seriously that the failure was caused by SL, my hd was on its last legs anyway, so just my 2 cents.

I've also had constant blue screens of death, since i started playing Secondlife. My computer ran just fine until i installed this program, butI have had nothing but grief from it ever since. I have lost count of how many times I have had to do a full system restore!! And my pc is only being used for secondlife...nothing else. Also the proof was also in the scan disk. The amount of files it removed with my SL Username was a worry.
I USED to be a paying member, but totally refuse to pay for such a crappy service.