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system stability issues, what do I try / do next?

J

jamestown

n00b
Joined
Apr 3, 2007
Messages
15
I recently made the jump to sata drives (a 320gb wd and 750gb wd), and since then I have noticed some oddities in system stability that I have not been able to figure out the cause of.

I don't get bsod, and I don't get the windows message "program x has to close etc.". Sometimes the computer hard locks and sometimes it comes back if I cancel the last operation I did and wait like 10 min. When the computer locks windows explorer and task manager become totally unresponsive. Sometimes num lock still flashes on and off, with about a 3 second delay after me pressing the button.

The last four times it locked on me I was doing the following:
1) copying files from one hard drive to another
2) unraring a file
3) deleting my temp internet files
4) nothing, I came home from work and the windows clock had stopped an hour earlier, only utorrent and zonealarm were running, hard lock

These seem consistent in reads and writes being performed, althought I have not been able to nail down a case to reproduce the issue.

What I have tried:
- updated my mobo bios from 1009 to 1303
- increased my ram voltage
- ran memtest86+ for 8 hours + (no errors)
- ran two instances of prime95 for 12 hours (no errors)
- downloaded and ran the western digital dlgdiag for windows (no errors)

I'm not sure what to try next, or if there is some other driver etc that I need to upgrade. Is there a more robust filesystem testing software to help me rule more things out? Any suggestions welcome.
 
Try updating your motherboard (chipset) drivers. But obviously OSes are complicated and fail in some circumstances, when this happens all you can do sometimes is reinstall the OS. If your OS install is vital and you have time, I would install another XP instance to another hard drive and run it with no programs/updates/drivers and see if it had the problem as well, that would at least tell you if it was your XP install or your hardware.
 
Check the event log to see if any hard drive related errors are occuring, or any other errors for that matter.
 
There are no errors in either the application or system event logs. There are a couple of warnings,
"TCP/IP has reached the security limit imposed on the number of concurrent TCP connect attempts."

"An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk0\D during a paging operation."

Neither correspond with the exact times my system hung today so they may or may not be informative. What do you think?

I'm going to give a fresh install a try tomorrow and install the latest chipset drivers to see if the problem persists.

edit - spelling
 
I read that that one warning (error) is caused by native command queing, so while Im at it Ill give it try a with that turned off as well.
 
jamestown said:
4) nothing, I came home from work and the windows clock had stopped an hour earlier, only utorrent and zonealarm were running, hard lock
Click to expand...

That has been a major intermittent problem with me and Vista. The first time it happened (repeatedly over the course of several months), I ended up replacing my PSU. At the time I was also having other problems (random shut offs) so it's possible it was not related.

That ended it for a long time. ~2 months ago it happened again a few times. Since then I've reformatted and also installed SP1, nothing since, but we'll see...

This kind of hard lock is very annoying, as there's nothing in the Event Viewer or anything. :(
 
"An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk0\D during a paging operation."
Thats pretty significant.

If NCQ off doesnt fix it, try a slower FSB clock.
The reason I say this is because I found some motherboards in Nforce 4 days clocked up the SATA RAID controllers with the FSB.
I found I couldnt use the RAID controllers when overclocking.
You may have the same problem.

Are the drives all connected to the non RAID controller, or the RAID controller or a mix?
You might want to try them all on the non RAID controller.
 
Sounds power related to me. Back off on any overclock and see if it stabilizes. If it does, you may need to do some voltage tweaking to bump the speed back up. I would probably try to increase the CPU volts a little bit, but do so at your own risk.
 
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