Mounting VeraCrypt volume results in 100% disk usage and extremely slow...
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Hi All,
A new issue that just recently appeared. Steps to reproduce:
Result: Disk Usage is marked at 100%. All operations that require disk access (even many on the non-encrypted system drive) are extremely slow. The newly mounted drive is inaccessible. Windows 10 grinds to a near halt.
The only recent major change was updating Windows 10 with the March and April 2020 patches. After shutting down last night and rebooting, this 100% disk usage issue began happening.
Any thoughts / other things I can try, or anyone else experiencing this issue?
I always wanted to be a net-positive contributor to this great project via GitHub or donations, but am afraid I'm in debt after this question. :-p
I should have mentioned that this issue happens with both VeraCrypt 1.23 and 1.24-Update6
I'm currently copying the volume to another mostly-identically setup machine (at least software-wise) and will attempt to mount it on that machine. Given its size, it might take 33 - 60 hours to copy.
Even if the volume is bad, ideally Windows 10 should never peg out at 100% disk usage. Interested to see if I see the same behavior on the secondary machine.
Also, I plan to attempt a chkdsk /f via the VeraCrypt GUI after the copying is done. An earlier chkdsk (no fix) stated (paraphrasing):
Stage 1: no bad file records (25451 reparse records processed, 719104 file records processed)
Stage 2: no unindexed files (25451 reparse records processed, 759050 index entries completed)
Stage 3: "The Volume Bitmap is incorrect" (everything else looks OK to me)
I'll post what the results are to both tests / fixes when done.
Solved (I think).
Test 1: I wasn't able to copy the volume over to another machine (it was too big and kept timing out).
Test 2: But check disk (chkdsk /f) via the VeraCrypt GUI fixed the "The Volume Bitmap is incorrect" issue(s).
Now, the volume is mounted and Windows disk usage is not pegged at 100%.
Just a quick update: the issue happened again, and again chkdsk /f via the VeraCrypt GUI fixed the Volume Bitmap issue again. Up and running again.
It seems like this rears its ugly head when there is a lot of disk activity and the system crashes (BSOD or just hangs). Maybe this old hard drive is failing...
Anyway, it's hard to tell if Windows 10 or VeraCrypt is handling this situation poorly.
Can you list your computer specs, such as Make/Model, ram, hard drive...?
It looks to me like it's a hardware or OS releated issue.
I started to think a hardware issue when you mentioned 33-60 hours to copy. Is this referring to that 299GB file? I have recently done a 1.7TB backup (about 5x larger than yours) which took 5 1/2 hours on modern hardware, over usb 3.0. So if using newer, mostly modern hardware it shouldn't take near that long to copy a 300GB file.
HP offers its own diagnostics test which is not related to the OS. If your using HP or another brand that offers its own (I believe most brands do) you can even use that to perfrom hard drive/ram test. RAM tends to have issues most users don't seem to be a ware of. For e.g When i had a failed ram module earlier this year, I was creating a lot of tar.gz archive file (similar to zip or 7z), which were 'successfull' at least as it was shown. But during extraction, it failed each and every time of any archive above 500MB. Something got corrupted when reading/writing ram, luckily I had backup's, so I didn't loose anything but these are issues that do occur, could be similar for you. Ram is possible, but likely to be hard drive, if its a hardware issue that is.
Can you try creating a new test container of maybe 20GB in size on a different computer and report back the time it took to create (If used a different size, post that as well), and whether or not you have the same or even different issues?
If the above doesn't fix it, or help diagnose the cause, you can try another method. Instead of doing a factory reset (which would only fix it, if it were non-hardware related), you can try using a live linux distribution (running linux within ram, which doesn't harm the current OS, or your data residing on it).
You can go to https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop and download it's iso.
On Windows, you can use rufus https://rufus.ie/ to write the iso to a usb drive. (Be sure the USB is empty, it will be formatted). You can then boot off of it from your current PC and try it.
If you need further help if trying this, let me know.
Basically what were trying to determine now is if its hardware or OS related issue. It doesn't sound likely to be VeraCrypt based on other information you've given.
The first step I would personally try is creating a new container from scratch on a different computer, if it works with no issues its to do with either the hardware/os of your pc originally have this issue. If it doesn't work, then likely to be a bug in the program (or in the windows 10 os, if on same/near identical versions). If it does work on 2nd computer, then on 1st computer I would try booting into linux distro and testing it their. Linux is a lot different than windows though, so if you've never used linux it can be a challenge but if it works here this would rule out possible hardware issues. If it still fails to work, then likely to be hardware issues.
Trying not to sound to confusing, but I think you see what Im trying to do. Rule each issue out of the game, to find the the real issue that needs to be fixed.
Let me know what you try and how it goes. :)
Hi Steven,
Sorry for the tardy reply. Pandemic stuff + the computer crashing was slowing us down.
Your hunch was correct: it appears it was a hardware issue (bad disk sectors).
To recap what I observed: 100% disk usage often, particularly when accessing certain files and used the VeraCrypt volume. Infrequently, Windows 10 would blue screen.
Via the BIOS, my computer provides a thorough system check. That check stated that the hard drive was bad and needed to be replaced immediately (RAM, motherboard, and everything else was OK).
Then, numerous chkdsk /f tests while Windows 10 was running yielded no errors on either the system drive or VeraCrypt volume. However, a chkdsk /r did the trick. chkdsk /r required the system to reboot and before Windows 10 fully starts, it checks and repairs.
chkdsk /r marked several sectors as bad and listed which files used those sectors. Interestingly, those files using bad sectors were the files that were causing 100% disk usage. Two prime examples: my email client's calendar file was using a bad sector, and every time I opened my email client calendar, disk usage spiked at 100%. Also, most relevant was that the VeraCrypt volume had a bad sector as well. Therefore, there was often 100% disk usage when using the VeraCrypt 299GB volume.
Amazingly, VeraCrypt was still able to work (mostly) even with the volume containing bad sectors!
To move forward, I decided to copy everything to a different computer and deprecate the original machine. Mounting the original volume in read-only mode, I was able to quickly copy the files to another machine. Sometimes, a file copy would fail and I'd need to retry. There were a handful of files (~ 0.001%) that I could not copy at all, but no big deal. The source machine has been blue-screening about once every two days.
So, in short, if anyone experiences similar 100% disk usage symptoms, try your manufacturer's system diagnostic check (might be in the BIOS), then run chkdsk /r.
Thanks again for your help!
chkdsk /r: Locates bad sectors and recovers readable information. The disk must be locked. /r includes the functionality of /f, with the additional analysis of physical disk errors. [1]
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/chkdsk