Boot Time Defrag + Windows 8 = Catastrophe

Defraggler
21

UEFI has NVRAM it can store bootloader information to. But only for pure EFI Windows environments, as far as i know. Mine wasn't.

You can check for information stored in NVRAM using bcdedit. I did and it was confirmed empty.

Apart from that, it has a CMOS clear like any other BIOS, which i've tried multiple times, to no avail.

The link you've posted concerns secure boot, which i've covered somewhere near the beginning of the thread. That was my first guess, but unfortunately, it's not the culprit (i've disabled it, and Windows doesn't use it unless in pure EFI mode). I also thought it might be the fast boot (or quick start or whatever Microsoft calls it), but that's been long disabled too, to no effect.

22

Another update. And a success!

I had an old copy of Paragon Disk Tools lying somewhere and i half-remembered it had some kind of a defragment option for NTFS.

So i've dug it up, booted it and ran the NTFS defrag, which turned out to also involve a rather thorough filesystem check and $MFT rebuild.

After running through all of that, UEFI suddenly stopped crashing. I've got no clue what went wrong in the first place, but if i had to bet, my money would be on Defraggler somehow corrupted the MFT mirror, while leaving the original MFT fine (perhaps they didn't get synced?) and UEFI being overly paranoid over not finding them identical. All this is just a wild guess and i might be completely off.

23

I like your guess - it has a ring of truth :)

I remember that Paragon also claim the ability to fix the problem

Misalignment of logical partition sectors and actual physical sectors leads to redundant read/write operations.

http://www.paragon-s...tion-alignment/

Is there any possibility that Paragon might have done that to your disc ?

24

It's possible.

Funny thing. Along the way, i've also converted everything to GPT, moved it to another disk, recreated the boot environment as pure EFI and cleaned out some garbage. So at least it wasn't all for nothing, i guess.

Also funny - after fixing it, it actually ran Defraggler at boot :)

Successfully as well.

Not that funny - i have an extra hard drive now. The moment the problems started, i bought another Velociraptor to be on the safe side. Not sure what to do with the old one now, i guess i'll turn it into a scratch/temp disk or something.

25

Congratulations.

You worked hard and achieved well deserved success.

26

LOL, thanks.

I just have this little nagging worry in the back of my head that says: "What if it happens again? And again?"

I don't like the idea of: a) filesystems getting "subtly" corrupt randomly like that, and b ) BIOS being nosy and paranoid about the aforementioned filesystems.

27

Well done orcinus, and thanks for posting all the info.

It could well help someone else with a similar issue