Vista Freezing Problems

[Antar Bolaeisk]

Hello all,

I have been getting very annoying freezing issues with Vista for as long as I can remember. These freezes occur at any time with any program, or even no program, running and can last anything up to a minute and beyond. When a freeze happens it does exactly what it says on the tin, everything just stops and if I try to open up the taskmanager or even click on the start button nothing will happen. However, all the commands I give the computer during the lockup will stack and be executed once everything becomes responsive again. The only other thing that happens is the HDD activity LED is on full blast and the end of the freeze is generally signalled by the HDD clicking and the HDD light flashing which leads me to believe that this is a Hard Drive problem. Unfortunately it's not that simple as, under XP, this system performs perfectly and the problem described above never manifests itself. Therefore, the only conclusion I can draw is that there is some form of compatibility issue between vista and my HDD drivers.

Google has let me down on this problem as well, even though there are quite a lot of threads on the matter descibing very similar problems to my own, I have yet to find a solution that worked. One or two threads have described swapping the SATA ports that the drives are plugged into and disabling any that are not in use but this was one of the first things I tried to no success.

System Specs:

Gigabyte DS3P 965p
Intel E6320 @ 3.2GZ
OCZ DDR2 6400 4x1GB
2 x Western Digital Caviar 320GB
1 x Western Digital Caviar 160GB
ATI x1950pro 512MB (PCIe)
X-Fi Fatality
Corsair 620W power supply

I have tested the system overnight and it is orthos stable but just in case I reset the system to stock and still the problem persisted. This problem killed my RAID array which had been perfect under XP and even after the move to Vista 64-bit it still persisted. I have since moved back to 32-bit in the hopes that it was more likely to be solved there.

I have booted the system with as little hardware as possible and still the freezing happens. Event log has shown up nothing of use, or at least nothing that I can see though windows has come up with an error log saying that certain windows files could not be accessed but since these changed every time I ignored that and stopped taking down the file names.

I really am running out of ideas here and am wondering if anyone might have experienced something similar before and possibly were able to fix it or even just anything I could try such as application of a very large hammer?

Thanks in advance,
Antar Bolaeisk.

 

[Craig321]

I also had a problem similar to this when I used the "Previous Version" feature in my previous install of Vista.

Try turning system restore off to see if the problem carries on.

 

[Antar Bolaeisk]

System restore is off and has been since day one. I've never had to use it so it's usually one of the first things I disable.

 

[Craig321]

Strange. Is there any other hard drive you can install Vista onto that will use the same SATA controller, that way you can see if it's a faulty HDD or not.

 

[Antar Bolaeisk]

I'll give that a go tomorrow and see if it leads anywhere but I do have XP on the same drive as Vista, just different partitions, and there is no problem within XP.

The only other thing I can think of is that when I installed Vista I already had the RAID array set up so the RAID controller was turned on but not when I installed XP. This means that, even though I don't have a raid array any more, the raid controller has to remain enabled for me to boot into Vista but not when I'm booting into XP. Don't know if that would have an adverse effect on the system though.