Slow boot after random crash

[saintly]

Running my A64 4000 at 2.9 GHZ and I got a random reboot the other day - all I was doing was checking through some image files on the thumbdrive and it was not under load - it is prime95 and games stable, so I don't know if it was the overclock.

Anyway, thought whatever. But now it boots into XP and seems to load up my AV and network adapter etc fine, but it just thrashes the hard disk for a few minutes after that, and is pretty much unusable until it has stopped. Then it behaves fine.

Tried:

chkdsk to fix any bad sectors - no major probs.
defragged.
cleared prefetch.
virus and spyware scans - nothing.
deleting and reinstating my pagefile (which had fragmented).

All has no effect. Any ideas?

cheers

 

[Raumarik]

I had this problem before, it was a corrupt AV install although the program seemed to run ok when I uninstalled/reinstalled it suddenly the PC was back to normal. I'm not saying it's your AV though, chances are it's just one of the programs in startup or a device driver. Try to figure out what's loading just before/after the HDD thrashing occurs and uninstall/reinstall it (not just reinstall!)

Worth a try, you've done everything else I'd have done! Incidentally have you had a good look at the event viewer to see if there's any little messages on there?

 

[saintly]

Thanks.

I did look in event viewer and couldn't see much. The only think I did notice that concerned me was event 51 for disk, which apparently is the result of a bad transfer between memory and pagefile. However, looking through the log, I've been getting these for months!

 

[saintly]

I've tracked this down to my anti-virus real time scan service, but reinstalling the av program makes no difference.

So, something else conflicting with this?

It is the latest PCcillin.