Hard Drive Related Freezes

Zwaf · 04-10-2007, 10:06 AM

Ello

For about 2 weeks I've got a problem which causes my computer to suddenly freeze after 0.5hour/few hours, causing music to stop and a no longer responding mouse. (trying to say that.. only thing to do is slam the Reset button

)
I thought this had to do anything with hardware so I disabled the overclocking settings (got a 2.6 p4 OC'ed to 3.12), since these kind of freezes also used to happen when I had moments where I thought the FSB could take anything, I thought it had to be a problem with memory or CPU. (btw: Windows didn't show one of those popups with 'Your system has recovered from a serious error', which I could then send and find out more about what was causing it)

When I found out it wasn't actually caused by neither one of these I decided to defrag my second hard drive, which only had about 3% free space. The defragingtool (O&O Defrag) started analyzing and concluded that the degree of fragmentation was 20.8% and it started moving files.
But.... after just 30 seconds.. another freeze. I rebooted and tried again.. and it froze again.
My conclusion was that there was something wrong with the harddrive.

I tried to use the windows chkdsk during startup to fix possible errors on the drive, but it also caused a freeze (at phase 2, 69%).

After that I tried to move and delete some GBs from the disk that were heavily fragmented (defragmenting didn't work so..). But doing this also caused a freeze.

I decided to look in the Event Viewer whether there were any reports of hardware problems since Windows didn't gave me one of those popups. Found the following (time they occurred corresponded the time my pc froze):

* [Error1:] Eventviewer reports Harddisk1, which is my second harddisk.
* [Error2:] No idea what piece of hardware is connected to IDE2, the second harddisk is on SATA (or is that IDE2 ?)

Also found this, few days earlier (could not remember what I was doing at the time, guess nothing, apart from sleeping) :

I downloaded a tool to make a performance check on the harddisks. It reported my first hard disk to have a reliability of 70% due to a slow spin up but 0% of reading/writing errors.
The disk that is giving me a headache got 100/0% = perfect.

I downloaded HDtune to test the harddisk speed and it turned out to be only 3 mb/s, which’s absolutely crap. I reinstalled the chipset drivers (uninstalled the Ultra ATA Storage Controller in the Device Manager) and the speed got back to 60 mb, yeeeey. I thought I had fixed the freezing problem as well... but no way. But something DID change… I got other errors in the Event Viewer (no longer WARNINGS, it were ERRORS now):

To conclude the problem; Whenever I try to read/write from my hard disk it freezes after several minutes/ seconds.
This is more likely a problem I'd expect when installing a drive.. but it isn't. Installing the 320gb didn't gave any problems btw at the time.

And finally.. my (advanced) system specs:
Windows XP Pro SP2 (installed on the first 120gb drive, not the 'defect' one of 320gb, pagefile is also located on this 120gb drive)
Pentium 4 HT 2.6ghz (clocked to 2.8 or 3.2)
1024mb DDR400
Asus P4P800 SE – Intel 865PE Chipset and ICH5R
(AX800Pro 256mb, 500mhz core, directX9.0C)
And most important, the harddisks:
WD Caviar WD1200BB-22DAA0, IDE, 2 partitions of about 30 and 90 gb, making 120 gb. About 2.5-3 years old. 20% free space. Total time on: 470 days. Average speed: 30-40 mb/s
WD Caviar WD3200JD-00KLB0, SATA-1 , 1 partition of 320gb. About 0.5 - 1 years old. 3% free space. Total time on: 137 days. Average speed: 60-70 mb/s.

* They are not in RAID
* Both are 7200 rpm 's

Anyway, thanks for taking time for reading this extremely long post and hope someone has an answer (they didn’t on ‘software tips and tricks’ .. not even a reply lol)

**justpassingby** · 04-10-2007, 11:13 AM

Set your 320GB SATA drive in another computer and see if the read/write failures still occur on that computer.

If you can read from the disk, backup all your data, make some room on the disk and run "chkdsk drive_letter /F /R" (replace drive_letter by the disk's drive letter in that other computer).

04-10-2007, 10:06 AM	#1 (permalink)
Zwaf Registered User Join Date: Apr 2007 Location: Netherlands Posts: 2 OS: XP Pro	Hard Drive Related Freezes Ello For about 2 weeks I've got a problem which causes my computer to suddenly freeze after 0.5hour/few hours, causing music to stop and a no longer responding mouse. (trying to say that.. only thing to do is slam the Reset button ) I thought this had to do anything with hardware so I disabled the overclocking settings (got a 2.6 p4 OC'ed to 3.12), since these kind of freezes also used to happen when I had moments where I thought the FSB could take anything, I thought it had to be a problem with memory or CPU. (btw: Windows didn't show one of those popups with 'Your system has recovered from a serious error', which I could then send and find out more about what was causing it) When I found out it wasn't actually caused by neither one of these I decided to defrag my second hard drive, which only had about 3% free space. The defragingtool (O&O Defrag) started analyzing and concluded that the degree of fragmentation was 20.8% and it started moving files. But.... after just 30 seconds.. another freeze. I rebooted and tried again.. and it froze again. My conclusion was that there was something wrong with the harddrive. I tried to use the windows chkdsk during startup to fix possible errors on the drive, but it also caused a freeze (at phase 2, 69%). After that I tried to move and delete some GBs from the disk that were heavily fragmented (defragmenting didn't work so..). But doing this also caused a freeze. I decided to look in the Event Viewer whether there were any reports of hardware problems since Windows didn't gave me one of those popups. Found the following (time they occurred corresponded the time my pc froze): * [Error1:] Eventviewer reports Harddisk1, which is my second harddisk. * [Error2:] No idea what piece of hardware is connected to IDE2, the second harddisk is on SATA (or is that IDE2 ?) Also found this, few days earlier (could not remember what I was doing at the time, guess nothing, apart from sleeping) : I downloaded a tool to make a performance check on the harddisks. It reported my first hard disk to have a reliability of 70% due to a slow spin up but 0% of reading/writing errors. The disk that is giving me a headache got 100/0% = perfect. I downloaded HDtune to test the harddisk speed and it turned out to be only 3 mb/s, which’s absolutely crap. I reinstalled the chipset drivers (uninstalled the Ultra ATA Storage Controller in the Device Manager) and the speed got back to 60 mb, yeeeey. I thought I had fixed the freezing problem as well... but no way. But something DID change… I got other errors in the Event Viewer (no longer WARNINGS, it were ERRORS now): To conclude the problem; Whenever I try to read/write from my hard disk it freezes after several minutes/ seconds. This is more likely a problem I'd expect when installing a drive.. but it isn't. Installing the 320gb didn't gave any problems btw at the time. And finally.. my (advanced) system specs: Windows XP Pro SP2 (installed on the first 120gb drive, not the 'defect' one of 320gb, pagefile is also located on this 120gb drive) Pentium 4 HT 2.6ghz (clocked to 2.8 or 3.2) 1024mb DDR400 Asus P4P800 SE – Intel 865PE Chipset and ICH5R (AX800Pro 256mb, 500mhz core, directX9.0C) And most important, the harddisks: WD Caviar WD1200BB-22DAA0, IDE, 2 partitions of about 30 and 90 gb, making 120 gb. About 2.5-3 years old. 20% free space. Total time on: 470 days. Average speed: 30-40 mb/s WD Caviar WD3200JD-00KLB0, SATA-1 , 1 partition of 320gb. About 0.5 - 1 years old. 3% free space. Total time on: 137 days. Average speed: 60-70 mb/s. * They are not in RAID * Both are 7200 rpm 's Anyway, thanks for taking time for reading this extremely long post and hope someone has an answer (they didn’t on ‘software tips and tricks’ .. not even a reply lol) Last edited by Zwaf; 04-10-2007 at 10:08 AM.

04-10-2007, 11:13 AM	#2 (permalink)
justpassingby Moderator, Microsoft Support Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: Belgium Posts: 6,124 OS: XP Home SP3 / Ubuntu My System	Re: Hard Drive Related Freezes Set your 320GB SATA drive in another computer and see if the read/write failures still occur on that computer. If you can read from the disk, backup all your data, make some room on the disk and run "chkdsk drive_letter /F /R" (replace drive_letter by the disk's drive letter in that other computer).