Interesting problem for computers guys

DrSpike · March 13, 2003, 20:35

Ok here's the deal.

Randomly, every week or so, my hard drive begins to lock up for a couple of seconds (the light stays on, and whatever is happening freezes), with the problem getting worse until all my apps crash. Usually then when I restart there are problems reading the drive on bootup, leading to various "cannot find x.sys type errors". A few restarts, or perhaps leaving it off for a while always fixes it.......but it is getting worse.

Now, I am virtually certain there is nothing wrong with this drive. On the 6 days a week it works fine I have checked it and checked it........it is fine. I am certain I have no viruses, I am very careful, so I rarely get them, and have checked to make sure anyway.

I began to wonder if another component could be on the way out, causing there to be problems reading the drive. Well tonight I had some time so I whacked in an old drive with win98 on it, and did a lot of general things to tax my components to see if I could replicate the error with a different drive. I couldn't.

So it is the drive..........but it is fine most of the time. It is working again now.........I just played quake3 for an hour with no hiccups.

So it can't be the drive........can it?

Anyone have any idea whatsoever what could cause such an intermittent hard drive error? I haven't reinstalled win2k for a while, but then, some of the time the problems occur as soon as the drive starts to get read on bootup.

In 4 years of building systems I have never seen such an annoying error.

HELP.

Asher · March 13, 2003, 20:39

Yes, it can be the drive.
Yes, it can be something else as well.

Run chkdsk/Norton Disk Doctor on the drive and defragment and see if it persists first, it shouldn't hurt anything.

DrSpike · March 13, 2003, 20:45

Bloody hell........5 minutes, good stuff.

I've ran chkdsk a 100 times......it says it is all fine. I don't have disk doctor, but I'll try and get it if you think I should check the drive with that as well.

What else apart from the drive could it be to cause such an intermittent error? One that on cautious testing seems not to be replicable with the other drive (though of course it might have if I had tried for long enough).

Asher · March 13, 2003, 21:20

Quote:

Originally posted by DrSpike
Bloody hell........5 minutes, good stuff.

I've ran chkdsk a 100 times......it says it is all fine. I don't have disk doctor, but I'll try and get it if you think I should check the drive with that as well.

Norton Disk Doctor is nice if you have it, but chkdsk basically does the same thing. Don't go out and buy it.

Quote:

What else apart from the drive could it be to cause such an intermittent error? One that on cautious testing seems not to be replicable with the other drive (though of course it might have if I had tried for long enough).

I've never really had a problem like this before, but harddrives are mechanical devices, so I'd think it's most probable that the drive itself needs to be replaced.

Other things you could check are the cabling, and even making sure you have the latest BIOS and motherboard drivers.

DrSpike · March 13, 2003, 21:36

Yeah, I've changed the cable, and the drivers are up to date. I'm not flashing the BIOS without good reason.

This drive worked fine for a year.........but I suspect it is the problem. It's just the intermittent nature of it that's so frustrating. I can buy another drive.......in some ways it'd be easier if the drive just died.

Urban Ranger · March 13, 2003, 22:51

It can be a bad sector developing somewhere - possibly somewhere important too.

When you run Check Disk next time, do a complete scan of surface area.

pg · March 14, 2003, 02:08

reformating will probably fix it(and it's really not that hard especially if you backup stuff on cdr or a 2nd hard drive). when is the last time you have done a clean wipe and total reinstall of windows/etc? windows(especially 95/98 and maybe me) run shittier and shittier the older they get and the more they are used in my experience.

Urban Ranger · March 14, 2003, 06:20

You are thinking about low-level formatting. IDE drives don't do that these days.

DrSpike · March 14, 2003, 06:50

I probably will reformat and see if it makes a difference this weekend, because it has been a while. But it is my belief that the drive is on the way out.......so I think I better get a new one if that doesn't work. I also want to try defragmenting when I have time, as Asher suggested.

Of course taking it apart and putting it back together seems to have worked for the minute.

Skanky Burns · March 14, 2003, 06:57

If you can, ditch the drive and get a replacement. You really don't want your data sitting on a drive thats about to die.

TheBirdMan · March 14, 2003, 07:30

I have seen a problem like that before.

It was on a older pc with a damaged cache on the cpu.

I had to disable the cache in the bios and to compensate for that, I increased the amount of RAM with a factor 4 (to 256 Mbyte).

Another - probably more common problem is: The fan on the powerunit is defect. Within ½-1 hour, when the cpu gets too hot, it starts doing very strange things such as lockup, calculate wrong etc..... you never know.

DrSpike · March 14, 2003, 07:33

The fan is ok..........but I haven't ruled out that the processor is damaged in some way. I did seemingly get it to work once by underclocking the processor, though this could have been coincidental.