Bitcoin Core 0.10.2.0 x64 on Win 8.1 crashing

[DarkMatter]

...

[achow101]

Your database is corrupted again, so you need to reindex the whole thing. Anytime Bitcoin Core crashes or you terminate it without letting it shutdown properly, you will need to reindex the database. That should fix your problems.

[achow101]

Yeah. Delete the whole directory and redownload the blockchain. It seems like the files containing the raw blocks was corrupted.

[achow101]

Sigh, it's gonna take ages
Care to suggest me a good light client for the windows platform?
I'll move my bitcoins to it once I get back in control of them.

edit: Should I copy over my wallet.dat before or after synchronizing the blockchain data?

I would recommend MultiBit or electrum. I have used multibit before and it is pretty good. I haven't used electrum, but from what I have heard, it is a very nice client.

It doesn't matter when you copy the wallet.dat back, as long as it is there and replaces the one that Bitcoin Core generates.

[achow101]

I'm also running out of ideas. Try reinstalling. Besides that, the only thing I can think of is that your hard drive is failing.

[2112]

Anyway, I'm wondering how this corruption happened.

You have bad hardware: either SSD, SATA controller or DRAM memory.

Go get a Bittorrent client and download a bunch of multi-gigabyte files, maybe even the Bitcoin torrent. After download force the recheck of downloaded files multiple times in your Bittorrent client.

If you are moderately knowledgeable Windows user download some big files from Microsoft (e.g. Windows evaluation disk images) and multiple times verify SHA1 checksums that Microsoft supplies.

I'm betting on bad SSD, Bitcoin-Core uses write-ahead-logging databases that are pessimal case for SSD usage: lots of very short writes and no reads of the written logging data, which causes humongous write amplification.

Is any other database engine working correctly on your machine, e.g. MS-SQL or Oracle?

[2112]

I'm not running the client on an SSD, I'm not crazy
No databases installed on this computer.
HD has healthy smart parameters, and an hdtune error check didn't find any problem on the disk surface.
I'll check for cpu and ram issue, but the system has been pretty rock solid since months, except for this.

I think hdtune only does read test, not the read-modify-write tests.

For CPU & RAM testing the best is "Torture test" in the Mersenne primes search program prime95.exe.

I also forgot the standard Windows database killers: online antivirus needs to be disabled.

Bitcoin-Core during initial synchronization is quite well optimized and really stresses the machine more than 95% of programs we've tested. So your "rock solid" doesn't mean much unless you've run something in the upper 5% of optimization & efficiency.