Bitcoin core doens't respond #12170

Hi,

Bitcoin core 0.15.1 get's stuck when I try to open program. Most of the time it goes through the update startup rocess oke and then wehen it starts loading it get's stuck. I looked in the error.log and this is what it says something like: 2018-01-12 12:08:05 LevelDB read failure: IO error: E:\BT\chainstate\101461.ldb: Can't execute because of an error in I/O-device.

2018-01-12 12:08:05 IO error: E:\BT\chainstate\101461.ldb: Can't execute because of an error in I/O-device.

I have the bitcoin folder on external harddrive. It worked fine a couple of weeks ago when I went to update after a couple of months of not connecting. Everything was updated fine and working properly. Then I wanted to do a little test and opend an online account on Blockchain and transfered a minimal amount as a test. Test went fine but after that I was no longer able to open my Bitcoin Core wallet because of above descibed error.

Can anybody help? Thanks in advance!

You have an I/O error. This means the operating system is failing to read from your drive.

I'm afraid your harddrive is failing.

Thanks for your response! The drive is no older than 4 months! Can it be anything else? Can I try to copy the folder to HD and see if this works?

also...I can reach the external drive from my windows expolerer and copy and paste files from here fine!

I'd advise against using an external hard drive, as a loose contact could lead to those errors. C.f. also #11569 (comment)

It doesent matter how old the drive is, what matters is the IO throughput and its connection bandwidth to the mainboard. If its a single hdd (not ssd) that might be the bottleneck. https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-linux-unix-test-disk-performance-with-dd-command/ Anything below 4GB ram, make sure you have 4+ gb swap. Loading large wallets i recognized ram, swap & cpu may be bottlenecks too, in that order. Another thing, look at that you use USB 3.0 ports if connected by USB.

I run full nodes with xternal drives on x240 & x260 netbooks, netbooks have a ssd as sys drive and ssd for external bitcoind drive.

...... really, basically.. regardless what yo do, when yo received the I/O failure error messages....it doesn't mean 100% the PHYSICAL I/O devices have some thing wrong... (because , either the thing can't write into I/O (could be physically gone, or the I/O doesn't let the thing to access, or some thing else in the middle doesn't let the thing to write or access the I/O) so clearly, you need to narrow down... which is which... in your case .. smell like ..right level or permission... good luck