intermittent "unable to write to C:" and scrambled data problems

[sdakota]

My girlfriend's PC has two intermittent disk problems which I suspect may be related.

PROBLEM ONE: when booting we sometimes get a Blue Screen of Death describing a fatal Windows error "fatal exception 00 at 0028:C17F4854 in VXD ESDI_506(01)".
Pressing anykey results in a blank, black screen, so I CTRL/ALT/DEL and get another blue screen saying "Disk Write Error, Unable to Write to Drive C:". Cold rebooting is eventually successful. BOOTLOG.TXT states "LOAD FAILED" for ESDI_506.PDR when this error happens. I've re-installed ESDI_506.PDR from CD, didn't help.

PROBLEM TWO: The data on drive D: (primary slave) has gotten "scrambled" a few times. By this I mean filenames change to include misspellings, files become unreadable and even the volume label has changed from AVSTORAGE to A0s0Oragu.

These problems have occurred intermittently since she got the PC. She is running Windows 98 SE. The problems don't seem to occur when booting in safe mode, which makes me suspect a startup conflict of some kind, but the only error I've seen in BOOTLOG.TXT is the ESDI_506.PDR load failure.

Any help would be greatly appreciated !

Thanks,
Greg

 

[Rhort]

The exception 00 is a divide overflow exception. It basically means that the hard drive controller is showing zero sectors per track. This makes the driver divide by zero when trying to communicate with the device.

To work around this problem:

Boot to a command prompt by pressing the F8 key when you see the "Starting Windows 95" message and select Command Prompt Only from the menu.

Enter the following two commands:

cd\windows\system\iosubsys
ren esdi_506.pdr esdi_506.old

Restart your machine

Renaming the Esdi_506.pdr file makes Windows use MS-DOS Compatibility mode for the HDD which can mean less than optimal performance, but this should fix your problem.

 

[Jakespeare]

I would try moving that SLAVE Drive to the secondary channel with the CD-ROM.

Also: Is that the EXACT error message ?

"fatal exception 00 at 0028:C17F4854 in VXD ESDI_506(01)".

 

[sdakota]

Rhort: Thanks for the info ! I had wondered what the exception 00 meant. I think your solution would quite possibly work, but I want to keep the performance as good as possible since my GF wants to do video editing . Of course slow performance is better than random data scrambling !

Jakespeare: The secondary channel has a CD-ROM and a CD-RW on it, but maybe moving the drive is a good idea - it would tell me whether the drive itself is bad.
I may have to move it to another PC to check this out.

I was kind of abbreviating the error message, it's actually like this:
" WINDOWS
A fatal exception has occurred at 0028:C17F4854 in VXD ESDI_506(01) + 00000674.
The current application will be terminated. Press any key to terminate the current application. Press Ctrl Alt Del to restart your computer. you will lose any unsaved information in all applications. Press any key to continue"

Note that the value C17F4854 has also been C17F69A4 or C17F57D4 at times.

Do you think it might be the HDD controller ? That may explain why we have problems with both drives. It bugs me because I generally associate intermittent problems with hardware, but this problem seems to go away when booting into Safe Mode, which would seem to indicate a software problem !

Thanks very much for your help !

 

[sdakota]

The solution to this problem was to replace the HDD ribbon cable.

 

[FatesWebb]

The esdi_506 like he says points to the hdd controller, and what he said will work. I have seen this before in win95