I have half my USB drive as a normal FAT32 partition and the other half as a TrueCrypt partition. When I have the TC partition mounted and leave the computer on at night (for example) I almost always wake up to a blue screen. This seems to happen more frequently when I leave Portable Firefox running (it's on the TC partition), though it happens in other circumstances, too.
Any idea what's going on here?
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Unmount and remove the USB drive before going to sleep. Problem solved.
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I just started to get random blue screens also. I have my usb drive setup with Trucrypt in traveler mode and I almost always get blue screens complaining about a driver failing with the error pointing to the file fastfat.sys. I looked up the stop error but it is just a generic error with no real information on fixing it or preventing it. Any ideas?
TrueCrypt seems to be a common link between your issue and the original poster's issue. Maybe its a bug with TrueCrypt that occurs after TC has been running for extended periods of time.
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I've used to mount my TrueCrypt volume at the morning and dismount at late afternoon, this means 8..10 hours of massive usage, but this is a hard drive based volume (keep synced with the one on mypendrive).
I've never tried to keep mounted my USB drive for such a long time, the longest period was, I think, about three hours, without any problem.
Personally, I guess keep mounted an USB drive, even with a TrueCrypt volume for such a long time, like all night, is not a healthy stuff to do, possibly could lead to such situations.
Why should it be "no healthy stuff"?
Hi,
I just started to use an usb stick with an truecrypted container file holding portable apps and my data...
I work long hours in front of a computer, today the first try with mounted truecrypt volume...
Result, 2 times a BSOD after some hours of mounted truecrypt volume. I will try with only USB Stick attached, without mounting truecrypt. This would indicate a bug with truecrypt.
krassna
Sounds like you've got the Blue Screen of Death, usually not the best of screens.
So why and how do you get the BSOD with a TrueCrypt Partiton running overnight?
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I'm no TrueCrypt expert. Maybe both your computers just happen to be screwed up by coincidence.
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Yes, I really don't know that and everyone around me says I should go to "Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader".
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Coincidence is an event that might have been arranged although it was really accidental and conscience is motivation deriving logically from ethical or moral principles that govern a person's thoughts and actions
Arg, I am having this same problem. System was totally stable for months and now blue screens all the time. Crashes in fastfat.sys. It only happens when using PortableApps on my truecrypt traveller disk.
Anyone have a solution?
Any chance that your PC suspends after a few hours idle?
If so.... the defaults for TrueCrypt are that if the machine enters any sleep state it will force-dismount any drives and exit hard - sometimes with a crash, since the Windows kernel doesn't really expect apps to try to exit when it sends them the sleep notification.
This is because it is the ONLY way that it can ensure that decrypted data, such as cached passwords or cached decryption keys are not written to the hibernate file.
However, if firefox is running from the TC volume, a forced dismount is very likely to bsod on you then.
Personally, I've used TrueCrypt for literally days on end without dismounting one partition on a USB HDD, meanwhile mounting and dismounting one on a flash drive that goes with me several times a day - no crashes at all, except on the occasions that I hit the wrong key on my keyboard and it tries to sleep.
The disks spin down, but it never sleeps.
The error I get is sometimes slightly different in details, but always in fastfat.sys - the truecrypt mounted volume is the only FAT based filesystem on the machine..
... for me was to create big TrueCrypt partitions and format them with ntfs (I found a hint on this on a forum some time ago) . The problem is caused by fastfat.sys. It seems that there ar problems handling fat32 partions in TrueCrypt Volumes with sizes greater than 4 GB).
Since the change to ntfs I have never seen any BOD again. No problems sending my machine in sleep / hibernate mode a with mounted TrueCrypt Volume of 32 GB :-9
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Sounds interesting, though my truecrypt container is a FAT32 with less than 4GB...
As far as I know - to be confirmed - a negative aspect may be that NTFS has more disk activity than FAT32, as each read operation will be logged for the file? This would be wearing out the flash memory earlier, although there are discussions, that the risk of getting worn out is relatively small with more current USB Flash chips...
Last question, is NTFS finally out of beta support in Linux environments?
Reads aren't logged. That's not what journaling is for. Journals log writes, so that if a write is in progress and the drive is pulled, the file system doesn't get corrupted--the OS can just rewind the journal.
In the Truecrypt forum was a link regarding the ext2ifs driver causing the problem. Someone was able to fix his BSOD problem by removing this optional driver (which is used to read ext2/3 partition from windows).
I removed it as well, but the problem is still there. I will now try to set up a Truecrypt stick (not as a container file on a stick).
Next step would be also to use NTFS as suggested, however I don't like the idea, that data on my USB stick is then reliant more or less on a WinPC (excluding Linux / Mac).
I thought the BSOD became an issue when one was left an app open running from a TS container and somehow the TC container got dismounted. (TC does have some auto dismount I believe). So when the app is still running but its drive is gone, a BSOD might be expected.
Is this an idea, or did you confirm this fix?
I have an autodismount, when the computer goes asleep (standby). But this never caused a BSOD. Are there other dismount options set by default additionally?
Update on my bluescreens...
I moved the TC container from my USB kex to my hard disc. But also once again BSOD appeared!
(Before I removed ext2ifs and replaced the USB key. Maybe really a bug in TrueCrypt?)
krassna
I do not believe I have ext2ifs installed. But I have the same issues as people above TrueCrypt and Firefox Portable do not play nice. I have Fat32 running on the USB. Should I go to NTFS?