Botched block in the DB. Usually rebuilding the Armory DB is enough. Worst case scenario you'll have to delete your copy of the blockchain and redownload it
Why doesn't this worst case scenario excite me at all? Thing is like 30 gig.
I have to say that this bug has been there from the very beginning and somehow it's still not mitigated in any way. Reference bitcoin client has no issues with it, but somehow armory cannot handle it. Why? I call it bs.
It's very sad how otherwise functional client suffers from such usability problems.
Bitcoin Core checks for blocks THEN writes them to disk, and doesn't bother to verify they were written correctly, rather relying on its LevelDB database. On some occasions, that results in botched blocks. And yes, Bitcoin Core will fail to read these botched blocks if asked to.
Armory depends on the raw files for its blockchain data, this is when those botched blocks get in the way. You also can't access Bitcoin Core's DB since LevelDB is set to lock it at process level.
We could hack around that but that's too demanding, will impact stability, and reflects an underlying issues with your copy of the blockchain, which frankly you should fix. The long term solution which to be introduce after supernode and the new wallet format will be blocks over P2P.
A big thanks to Armory for helping to find this bad RAM! If it weren't for all of the double and triple checking in the Armory code, this could have gone undetected for months, and who knows what I could have lost!! Thanks!!!
Well, there are redundancy checks in place for the crypto data, and more on their way with the new wallet format, so while unstable hardware will give you a bad experience, it won't outright lose you coins.