Win 10x64: Newsbin corrupting hard disk

[cyana]

Dear all,

there appears to be a massive problem during the unrar process with NB version 6.53 and 6.61 as well in conjunction with Windows 10x64 pro. The unrar process suddenly freezes, and all open applications start freezing away as well. The hard disk with the download directory reports no more diskspace free, and a good bunch of the downloaded files are corrupted. When trying to scan/repair the hard disk, windows reports a problem with the shadow datas, and the disk is unreadable. The computer then is closed down due to a hardware problem.

I'm struggeling with this problem since I switched to win10 two months ago. In the beginning, I thought I'm dealing with a damaged hard disk, so I switched the download directory to the system SSD. This was a desastrous decision - I ended up with repairing the SSD and reinstalling win 10 from the scratch.

So it appears that there is something very wrong with the unrar feature in Newsbin - I have no problems when I unrar the files manually with winrar. While short files appear to make no problem, bigger files (>1 GB) regulary are crashing the system, leaving unreadable blocks on the hard disk.

As workaround I would be very grateful if someone could tell me how to disable the automatic unrar process.

thank you very much
cyana

[Quade]

So it appears that there is something very wrong with the unrar feature in Newsbin - I have no problems when I unrar the files manually with winrar. While short files appear to make no problem, bigger files (>1 GB) regulary are crashing the system, leaving unreadable blocks on the hard disk.

You can disable it from the autopar options.

As for your problem. There are many people using Newsbin with Win10x64 who aren't having any problems like this. In fact you're the only one reporting anything like this. My gut feeling is that there's something wrong with your PC or perhaps something unexpected about the RARS themselves. Newsbin just uses regular WinRAR code from the RARLabs source dump (the WinRAR people). Newsbin is just a regular program. It has no drivers, it can only talk to the disks the way windows allows programs to talk to the disks. There's no magic about the way it talks to them. Open, write, close. That's about it.

My feeling is, if the PC crashes, the PC has problems. Are you overclocking? Is this an AMD machine? Weird problems like this seem to happen to AMD machines.

[cyana]

Hi Quade,

thank you for your reply. My system is a Dell Precision T7500 with an Intel Xeon X5680 6core @ 3.33 GHz. No overclocking. 16 GB RAM.

As said, the problems started with switching to Win10x64pro - I'm using Newsbin since 2008 without any problem, and on this particular machine since 2010. Both the SSD and the hard disk are newer devices from 2014, that have no issues with other programs including original WinRAR. Now this of course does not exclude the problem stemming from a different source. However, it is strictly tied to Newsbin, and only happens during the unrar process.

thank you for your help, will disable autopar
Cyana

[Quade]

You might want to leave autopar turned on so it can still repair but disable the unrar.

I'd uninstall all your security software, except the MS supplied stuff, reboot and try some downloads. If that fixes the problem. Update or find different security software. Security software including V scanners and firewalls do install drivers and they can corrupt your disks. For your disks to get corrupted, something has to be happening down in the driver level.

[cyana]

Only win 10's genuine Defender and firewall is installed. My impression - from how the system is acting - is some kind of memory leak (?) that screws up the access to the hard disk. Maybe the hard disk gets too many write requests, and becomes unresponsive after some time - something like that seems to happen. Anyway, disabling autopar seems to work, no more crashes.

thanks
Cyana

[Quade]

Maybe the hard disk gets too many write requests, and becomes unresponsive after some time - something like that seems to happen. Anyway, disabling autopar seems to work, no more crashes.

On a fully functional PC when this happens, disk IO slows down but everything keeps working normally.

My expectation is that one of these days you'll come back here and mention you had to re-install windows or that a disk crapped out. This is a warning sign that something is wrong.

[cyana]

On a fully functional PC when this happens, disk IO slows down but everything keeps working normally.

Yes, this is what I would expect, too. I have 4 HDs and 2 SSDs on my system. Will clean another HD and switch the D/L directory to it, and see what happens. I'm struggling with this problem for three months now - I guess if it would stem from a fundamental hardware problem, the PC already would have quit out. As said, when the D/L was located on the SSD, same happened to the SSD while the HD was fine.

best greetings
Cyana

[tl]

there appears to be a massive problem during the unrar process with NB version 6.53 and 6.61 as well in conjunction with Windows 10x64 pro. The unrar process suddenly freezes, and all open applications start freezing away as well. The hard disk with the download directory reports no more diskspace free, and a good bunch of the downloaded files are corrupted. When trying to scan/repair the hard disk, windows reports a problem with the shadow datas, and the disk is unreadable. The computer then is closed down due to a hardware problem.

Your description makes it clear that you have a serious hardware error or hits a completely unknown OS bug (very unlikely).

With a proper OS (and Windows, Linux and OSX all qualify), user space programs simply can't cause things like needing to repair the filesystem or cause the disk to become unreadable, if they can it's classified as a catastrophic OS or driver bug, not a bug in the application...

It sounds like what starts it is that the disk goes offline and then the rest of the errors follows from that. Remotely diagnosing exactly where the problem lies (motherboard, faulty drivers/power-supply/cabling/disk) is very, very hard. The Event log may tell us more about what goes wrong and how, which may or may not be enough to figure out where the fault lies.

Reducing the load by doing things like pausing downloading while it's unraring may avoid triggering the actual underlying fault and in some cases this may be a working solution, but lets not dance around the fact that the real problem isn't Newsbin Pro (or any other user-space program), it's very likely hardware and if it's not it's driver/firmware or OS (in descending likelihood).

[Quade]

the PC already would have quit out.

Might want to take the lid off and see how much dust has collected in the system. Sometimes there's enough dust to block airflow to the heat syncs.

[shapiro88]

I'm having the exact same issue. When I download files to my NAS, it invariably crashes the NAS. I have to delete the files and folders from the NAS and then I can access it again. This never happened under Win 8.1, but I'm not sure I can isolate the issue to Win 10 versus the latest version of Newsbin.

I'm at this moment downloading the same files under OS X using Unison to the same NAS with no problem.

The only other relevant information is I'm running Win 10 under Parallels. I was running Win 8.1 under Parallels, as well.

This appears to be a Newbin/Win 10 problem. Help is appreciated.

Thanks.

Seth