My HDD hates RTS games....

S

Sovereign

2[H]4U
Joined
Mar 21, 2005
Messages
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I was working on this over at Maximum PC. My HDD is acting very strangly. Most games run fine (CoD2, Doom III, Republic Commando, Halo) but all of the TWO RTS games I play (Star Wars: Empire at War and Age of Empires III) have major lockup problems. The games both stutter like hell in the opening intros (it was so bad with EaW that I downloaded a no-intro fix) and then proceed to lock up randomly (usually once every 5-10 seconds) while I try to join games, make games, PLAY games etc. I have defragged using PerfectDisk 7 and ran CHKDSK overnight. Still having these problems, I downloaded the SeaTools ISO (the drive is a Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 PATA ATA100) and burned it. The tests ran fine, until it was time to display the results. 20 minutes after the last test said "100%" the results screen was not forthcoming. Reset the computer and tried again, same result. The MaxPC people think my drive is the issue. Backed up all my valuable stuff to a DVD last night (the majority of my HDD is full of games that can be easily reinstalled). EVEREST has reported the following:
Raw Read Error Rate: Threshold of 6, Value of 63, Worst of 54, Data 236185524, Value is Normal. This seems weird....

HELP!
 
Not really, sorry. 1GB should be enough, and besides my RAM comes through clean on MemTest and the stuttering only started two weeks ago. Further, the IDE light seems to be on during 95% of the stuttering.
 
Sovereign said:
Not really, sorry. 1GB should be enough, and besides my RAM comes through clean on MemTest and the stuttering only started two weeks ago. Further, the IDE light seems to be on during 95% of the stuttering.
Click to expand...


Yep, sounds like a lack of ram and the games are swapping to the HDD. You probably installed something memory intensive, forcing the game to swap to the hdd.
 
But why would these problems start NOW when nothing had happened till now? I have not installed anything since these issus started. Games don't just suddenly start using more swap.... SpinRite found a sector that is bad AND it could NOT recover. How many seek errors are considered normal? SpinRite showed 20000+

Further, my event log has hundreds of errors (on one day) in "atapi"
The device, \Device\Ide\IdePort0, did not respond within the timeout period.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
and in "disk"
An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk0\D during a paging operation.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
 
Latest CHKDSK
Checking file system on C:
The type of the file system is NTFS.


One of your disks needs to be checked for consistency. You
may cancel the disk check, but it is strongly recommended
that you continue.
Windows will now check the disk.
The file reference 0x3b000000001fa0 of index entry Acr64.tmp of index $I30
with parent 0x27fb is not the same as 0x5b000000001fa0.
Deleting index entry Acr64.tmp in index $I30 of file 10235.
The file reference 0x210000000022c3 of index entry Adobelm_Cleanup.0001.dir.0000 of index $I30
with parent 0x27fb is not the same as 0x750000000022c3.
Deleting index entry Adobelm_Cleanup.0001.dir.0000 in index $I30 of file 10235.
The file reference 0x210000000022c3 of index entry ADOBEL~1.000 of index $I30
with parent 0x27fb is not the same as 0x750000000022c3.
Deleting index entry ADOBEL~1.000 in index $I30 of file 10235.
Cleaning up minor inconsistencies on the drive.
Cleaning up 24 unused index entries from index $SII of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 24 unused index entries from index $SDH of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 24 unused security descriptors.
CHKDSK is verifying Usn Journal...
The remaining of an USN page at offset 0x11a9f9e0 in file 0x4a7ef
should be filled with zeros.
The remaining of an USN page at offset 0x12069b88 in file 0x4a7ef
should be filled with zeros.
The USN Journal entry at offset 0x1206a000 and length 0x72615673 crosses
the page boundary.
The USN Journal entry at offset 0x1206b000 and length 0x73692072 crosses
the page boundary.
The USN Journal entry at offset 0x1206c000 and length 0x2928676f crosses
the page boundary.
Repairing Usn Journal file record segment.
Usn Journal verification completed.
CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in the volume bitmap.
Windows has made corrections to the file system.

117218240 KB total disk space.
90569788 KB in 252084 files.
91728 KB in 17564 indexes.
0 KB in bad sectors.
477116 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
26079608 KB available on disk.

4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
29304560 total allocation units on disk.
6519902 allocation units available on disk.

Internal Info:
90 35 05 00 5c 1d 04 00 34 65 06 00 00 00 00 00 .5..\...4e......
2a 0a 00 00 01 00 00 00 85 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 *...............
34 96 f5 08 00 00 00 00 92 cd ac 7f 00 00 00 00 4...............
be 8b 82 06 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 f8 fd 97 99 00 00 00 00 ................
99 9e 36 00 00 00 00 00 00 39 07 00 b4 d8 03 00 ..6......9......
00 00 00 00 00 f0 f0 97 15 00 00 00 9c 44 00 00 .............D..

Windows has finished checking your disk.
Please wait while your computer restarts.


For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
 
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