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Computer becomes unstable and doesn't boot

M

MrHood22

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Aug 21, 2007
Messages
4,312
Typically I restart my computer every ~10 days. Other than that I put it to sleep when I'm not using it. Probably goes to sleep an average of 3 times a day. I have an issue where iTunes stops responding. If I force close it the program exits but the service remains. If I force close the service I can't start iTunes again.

This has happened twice. The first time I shut the computer down and it was stuck on the shutting down screen for ~30 minutes so I just held the power button to shut it down. When I tried to turn it on it only recognized my HDD, not my SSD OS drive. I swapped the power and SATA cables and it still only recognized my HDD, not SSD. I plugged my SSD in to my laptop with a SATA to USB cable (w/ external power) and it recognized it. I plugged it back in to my PC and it didn't so I plugged it in to my PC with the external power but using the SATA cable going to my motherboard and it worked. Then I plugged it in using the PC power cable (so it was how it was originally hooked up) and it worked.

~2 weeks went by and it just happened again. However, when I plugged it in to my laptop it didn't recognize it. As I was researching the issue (~10 minutes) I noticed it found it. I unplugged it and noticed it found it right away. I plugged it in to my PC and it worked instantly.

I find it odd that each time it happens iTunes stops responding but I can just ignore that issue and go on using it (playing games, web browsing ,etc).

Corsair M4 128gb SSD. I followed the tutorials that give directions on prolonging the life of an SSD (disable defrag, etc). SSD is about 6 months old.


Cliffs:
-Itunes stopped responding so I force closed it. Didn't reopen so I tried to shutdown.
-During shutdown it hung on that screen for ~30 minutes
-Held power button
-Tried to reboot and it didn't recognize SSD.
-Swapped cables with HDD (recognized) and it didn't work.
-Hooked it up to laptop with external power and SATA to USB cable
-Recognized SSD immediately
-Hooked it up to PC again and it worked.
-2 weeks went by. Happened again today.
-Same process except it took ~15 minutes to be recognized by laptop
-Hooked it up to PC and it works fine.
 
Is your iTunes library on your HDD or your SSD?

I had a Macbook a while back where iTunes would stop responding and it would take the whole computer with it; necessitating a hard reboot. The problem didn't go as far as yours does with drives not being recognized, but it also didn't have two drives or an SSD. The solution was to create a new user profile for iTunes and everything sorted itself out.

On a Mac that's as easy as deleted to *.plist files, on a Windows machine it's a bit more complicated, and I'm not entirely positive that that's the route to go to fix it...so the easiest thing to do is to create a new user account on your PC (which will create a new iTunes profile) and try to recreate the problem. If it still fails with the new iTunes profile I would suspect that there's something wrong with the hardware of your computer. it could also have something to do with the UEFI/BIOS on your motherboard and possibly a chipset driver.

So you should also try updating to the latest drivers and flash your motherboard's BIOS/UEFI if possible.

After that I would try to eliminate hardware if you can, check the SMART status on the HDD, run it through a program similar to HDD Regenerator (there are plenty of utilities like that on the Ultimate Boot CD), Memtest 86+, etc. to try to rule out as much of the hardware as possible.
 
Actually I lied about the fix for the Macbook. I just looked up what the fix was for that particular machine (I'm really glad that I take meticulous notes as my memory, obviously, fails).

The fix for the Macbook was to repair the disk permissions.

It's also not as similar as I remember, the Macbook would play music from iTunes, but it would skip even with no other applications open...opening other programs would cause the entire system to lock up and necessitated a hard reboot.

I don't know how similar the Windows version of iTunes is to the OS X version of iTunes...though they seem to be structurally as similar as one can make them. So it might be worthwhile to check the permissions of the iTunes folder and elsewhere if you happen to keep your iTunes library somewhere besides the default location.

I think it's still a valid test to try a different user account, it would certainly eliminate the possibility of corruption with your user account and would give you (us) more information as to the nature of the problem.
 
The OS and iTunes is on the SSD. The iTunes Library is on network storage. The last thing I changed with my computer was adding the SSD ~6 months ago. I have 250gb+ of music associated with iTunes (don't ask) and I wasn't sure if it was freaking out because it's not designed to work with that much. I'll try updating the BIOS. I think I did when I installed the SSD because I reinstalled the OS and made sure to get all the latest drivers. I'll double check.

I think I'm also going to make an image of the drive incase it does fail.
 
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