Repeated BSODs (0x7A) while Win 7 is running

Question

I repeatedly encounter BSODs with this error code:

0x7A - KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR

My computer is running Windows 7 (all the latest updates and service packs installed).

I already looked up the error code online and many people have reported it out to be a problem with large SATA hard disks (1TB or greater) that take a long spin-up time while resuming Windows from hibernation but I don't have a large, 1TB hard disk.

My hard disk is a 500GB Hitachi HTS545050B9A300 and I do not encounter the BSOD while resuming from hibernation. My computer crashes with a 0x7A error code while I'm already logged into Windows. It happens randomly and I always do a CHKDSK scan after it does, and the problem still persists.

Also, just to be safe, I tried installing the Hotfix KB977178 hoping it'd solve the problem, but I get a message saying the Hotfix is not applicable to my computer.

I read elsewhere that the problem might be associated with a failing hard disk or memory module, so I downloaded CrystalDiskInfo and scanned my hard disk and I get this:

Does that mean I need to get a new hard drive? Or can I fix this problem some other way?

If you guys need more information, I have uploaded two Minidumps and a crash log into my Dropbox folder here: https://db.tt/FnLj8pgN

Answer 1

The C5 field of the SMART data (Current Pending and Uncorrectable Sector Count) means that you have 9 sectors that may be bad and that might be remapped. The C4 value (24A or I think 586 decimal) means that that many sectors have been attempted to be remapped (this seems unusually high). This also seems to be highly unusual given that the 05 field (Reallocated sectors count) is still at 0 . . .

As a bit of background, hard drives are shipped with some reserved sectors. When you get a bad sector on the main portion of the disk, it gets remapped to the reserve area, i.e. if you had sector with address n fail, the hard drive would remap that so all requests for sector at address n would now access the new sector on the reserved portion of disk.

Some people believe any counts in the C5 are a sign of pending doom, and replace their drives then.

People tend to see this failures like yours more frequently with hibernation as it's writing a large file to the disk, so the odds of getting a bad sector increase.

As for your Windows v. Ubuntu comment, it may be that only the section of disk that Windows is writing to has bad sectors, and the Ubuntu partition may be fine, meaning you wouldn't see hard drive related issues.