Box Started Glitching/lagging Options

[doveman007]

I first noticed problems with my box (Jasper, 15574) after installing the DLC2 for Ghost Recon:Future Soldier. It was taking a long while to verify the DLC and would lag/freeze briefly whilst doing so, before crashing but it turned out I just needed to get the latest TU for the game and it worked after that.

It still seems to have a bit of difficulty verifying the DLC though and lags/freezes briefly whilst doing so, which wouldn't be a problem but I've noticed that the game and Borderlands2 are being a bit glitchy as well. I haven't played any other games since, so it might affect others as well.

Has anyone else encountered this problem or know how to fix it?

[Aldanga]

Are you using a hard drive? It's possible that your hard drive is on the fritz.

[doveman007]

I am and sure it's possible. Are there any other possibilities though?

I cleared the Cache via the MS Dash just now but it's still acting up a bit. Like I pressed Guide to bring up the blades whilst waiting for a game to load and it didn't fill in properly but then I closed it and re-opened it and it was OK. Does it load the blade info from the HDD? I would have thought that was in the NAND somewhere.

This post has been edited by doveman007: Sep 28 2012, 06:48 PM

[Aldanga]

Some information in the guide is populated from local storage, which would include the hard drive. Almost all of your issues seem to be tied directly to the hard drive. I would recommend taking off the hard drive and using a USB stick to test DLC loading.

Also, if your HDD clicks at all, I'd bet a million bucks that it's on its last leg.

[doveman007]

I haven't noticed any clicking but I've got a 2.5"->e-SATA enclosure so I'll put the drive in that and scan it on my PC. I'm not sure I could do anything useful with a USB stick as most of the time FSD loads OK and the problems only happen later. For instance this evening, when loading Borderlands2 it hung so I rebooted and tried again and then it still took longer than it should to load but once it did, I played it for several hours without any problems.

[doveman007]

I checked the SMART info with HDTune and as you can see, it's showing a warning about "Current Pending Sector". I don't think the "Ultra DMA CRC Error Count" means anything, as it's only on one and the other drive I had in the 2.5"->e-SATA enclosure shows the same, so it's probably an issue with the enclosure rather than the drives.



I had trouble finding an app that can fully scan the drive as it's obviously not formatted for Windows but HDDScan is doing it now, so I'll see what that shows.

[doveman007]

Well it seems the drive is knackered from just past LBA 300,000,000. There's some issues before that though, including block 0 and a clump around 199,000,000.







There's some bad blocks but most of the problems appear to be blocks/sectors that take longer than 50ms to read.

I wonder if it's possible to mark the bad blocks as unusable and still use the rest of the drive?

I've probably got most of the games on my backup drive already but is there a way to copy the files from the dodgy drive into appropriately named folders, i.e. I keep the games backed up in folders like CODMW3\5445378 so that I know which folder is for which game. I can obviously copy the folders from the drive as is but then I'll just have folders named 5445378 which isn't that useful when I want to find a game to copy to the drive, so is there a program that will create human-readable folder names and copy the files to those?

I'm going to connect the drive directly to the motherboard rather than via the e-SATA enclosure and scan it again though, just in case the enclosure is causing problems.

[doveman007]

It does seem the enclosure was causing problems. Connected directly, I got a clear Error Scan in HDTune. I did a Quick scan first, which was all OK although it did seem to struggle a bit with about the last 50GB, then a Long scan as shown below.



I'll re-do the scan with HDDScan overnight.

[doveman007]

Well as you can see, the HDDScan shows that the problem was definitely with the enclosure and connected directly the HDD mostly seems OK.







There's no bad blocks but block 0 took longer to read than it should (343ms) and there were 5 other blocks that took between 50-100ms to read.

So if I can get the system to mark those blocks as unusable, the HDD should be OK to use. I'm not sure those few blocks could have been causing the problems I was having though, which suggests there's another problem with the Xbox.

[doveman007]

OK, I'm satisfied there's no problems with the HDD that could be causing my problems. I reconnected the drive today and was able to play RE6 for several hours, whereas I couldn't get past the first cutscene the other day without getting a dirty disc error (playing from the HDD!) but I did install a TU for it today so maybe that had something to do with it.

It still took longer than it should/used to, to return to the dash via Guide-Y afterwards. Then I tried LOTR: War in the North, which loaded fine but then gave a Fatal Crash error when trying to actually start the game after the character selection screen.

I wonder if there's anything wrong in my launch.ini which I've posted below. If not, I can only assume there's something wrong with the latest dash I built recently.

CODE

[QuickLaunchButtons]
Default = Hdd:\FSD2\default.xex
BUT_A = Hdd:\Applications\xexmenu\default.xex
BUT_B = Hdd:\Applications\xm360\XM360.xex
BUT_X = Hdd:\Content\0000000000000000\C0DE9999\00080000\C0DE99990F586558
BUT_Y = Hdd:\FSD2\default.xex
Start =
LBump = Hdd:\Applications\xellLaunch\default.xex
Back  = Hdd:\Applications\xellLaunchHDMI\default.xex

[Plugins]

[Settings]
nxemini = true

pingpatch = true

contpatch  = false

fatalfreeze = true
dvdexitdash = true
xblaexitdash = true
liveblock = true

livestrong = false

noupdater = true
nonetstore = true
signnotice = true

xhttp = false

autoshut = true
shuttemps = true
safereboot = true

nosysexit = false


autoswap = false

exchandler = true

[Aldanga]

So is this Xbox stock or glitched?

[doveman007]

It's JTAG'd. It seems to be behaving better at the moment. Maybe there was a dodgy connections and disassembling the HDD case and putting it back together fixed it. I reflashed it as well although I only had a dump made just after I flashed it with 15574, so if that was corrupt in any way I guess the dump would be too. If I find it still acting up, I'll try flashing it with a newly built 15574.

I was able to play RE6 for several hours yesterday (this was before reflashing it today), whereas before it would just crash with a dirty disc error (running from HDD) after the first cutscene (before the game actually started). I still get a Fatal Intercept crash when trying to load my savegame for LOTR:WITN but it works OK if I start a new game, so perhaps the savegame's just corrupt.

[duhasst0]

Try a defrag on the drive. Maybe it is just acting uo because everything might be spread further than it needs to be. You could also try a chkdsk to try and recover any blocks that might not be reading right.