PC freezes - HDD light constantly on

elrasho · 22 Feb 2011 at 13:32

I've noticed that at random times my PC freezes and becomes unresponsive (the mouse moves though). The HDD light stays on and this all lasts for around 20 seconds sometimes longer.

I have Win7 Pro and disabled indexing. I opened system monitor and when the freezing happened again I didn't see any changes in there. The hard drive is about 3 years old, could it be dying?

Dark_Angel · 22 Feb 2011 at 13:37

Have you checked out event logs?

elrasho · 22 Feb 2011 at 13:38

Yep doesn't show anything unusual

Hagar · 22 Feb 2011 at 13:38

Have you recently updated drivers? Graphics drivers? Try a clean install of them if you have.

elrasho · 22 Feb 2011 at 13:42

Haven't updated or installed anything new in years. I ran a virus scan using Avast which found 12 trojans, but they have been deleted/quarantined.

Tonester007 · 22 Feb 2011 at 13:43

Do you have SMART monitoring turned on for your hard drive?

elrasho · 22 Feb 2011 at 13:43

erm... I dunno is that something enabled in the BIOS? What does it do?

Ch3m1c4L · 22 Feb 2011 at 15:12

id say its a dying hdd :/

elrasho · 22 Feb 2011 at 19:41

I've disabled Superfetch and Indexing, lets see if that makes a difference

elrasho · 22 Feb 2011 at 20:35

Nope didn't make a difference

My hard drive has only got 8MB cache could that be the culprit? Also noticed it happens a lot more when I have a web browser open (Firefox or IE)

Catman05 · 22 Feb 2011 at 21:20

Try running Crystal Disk Info and see what that says

http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/index-e.html

elrasho · 22 Feb 2011 at 21:30

Crystal results: http://img291.imageshack.us/i/crystalhd.jpg/

I don't know what I'm looking for here but both my Samsung hard drives have similar results

Tonester007 · 22 Feb 2011 at 22:22

elrasho said:
erm... I dunno is that something enabled in the BIOS? What does it do?

Yeah, you set it in the BIOS and your PC will show a SMART status when you bootup.

It stands for "Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology" and can indicate a drive is about to physically fail.

You've nothing to lose by turning SMART monitoring on

Ch3m1c4L · 22 Feb 2011 at 23:17

on an old pc turning smart on in bios made my drive perform at around 60 percent worse, and software can poll smart data without it being on in bios anyway

elrasho · 23 Feb 2011 at 18:53

Ive turned SMART on and doesnt tell me anything, Ive ran the Samsun tool that runs off a boot CD and it said the HD is fine. I'm beginning to think I need to format and re-install Win7 as it must be a case of Win7 "is doing a WinXP" and needs to be installed again

Tonester007 · 23 Feb 2011 at 21:07

elrasho said:
...The hard drive is about 3 years old, could it be dying?

Tonester007 said:
Do you have SMART monitoring turned on for your hard drive?

elrasho said:
Ive turned SMART on and doesnt tell me anything...

SMART will just tell you that whether the physical drive is healthy or not.
If it isn't saying there are problems with the drive, then its probably not dying.

elrasho · 28 Feb 2011 at 13:44

used a program called ccleaner and my freezing has stopped