Hard drive problems

[mindrot]

My wife's PC has been crashing (blue screening) when she tries to access anything on a specific drive (not the boot drive).

I did a Dos CHKDSK and it came up fine as I thought there might be messed up sectors or something causing the problem. I went on to try HD Tune Pro (trial) which resulted in the PC blue screening again when I tried to test the problem drive.

What's strange (well to me as I'm no expert) is that I managed to copy all the files and directory's off the drive in Safe Mode (with Command prompt) using "xcopy" without any trouble.

I even went as far as to try a different IDE cable on the drive.

What could be causing this? Any help would be great.

Thanks

 

[ChrisLX200]

Inclined to say drivers, but the same drivers will be loaded in Safe Mode so it's not that simple. Perhaps an IRQ clash, some other driver (which is not loaded when in safe mode) interfering with the disk i/o drivers.

Could be anything really, but I would first try re-installing all your motherboard chipset drivers, take this opportunity to check if there are new ones. Go into Device Manager and 'uninstall' the disk controllers - Windows will ask you to re-boot to finish the process. On restart it will find the devices again and install the drivers fresh. May take a couple of re-boots to complete the process. It would be safer if you have a backup before messing with drivers and disks, but it is a fairly innocuous process.

 

[mindrot]

Thanks ChrisLX200... I'll probably look in to that tonight when I get home.

It's kind of strange as this only started happening recently. We also did a registry clean up (I think with Registry Patrol or something - name escapes me) on her PC a couple of weeks ago due to some stability issues, which it solved. Would that possibly have mucked things up?

Thnkas for your time.