Ello
Got this problem I tried to solve for about a week or two but found out I wasn't quite as blessed with the knowledge to do this so I used my best friend google to look for "hardware problems", and bang, first hit, here I am.
(If you don't feel like reading this entire story skip the first part)
For about 2 weeks I've got a problem which causes my computer to suddenly freeze after 0.5hour/few hours, causing music to stop and a no longer responding mouse.
I thought this had to do anything with hardware so I disabled the overclocking settings (got a 2.6 p4 OC'ed to 3.12), since these kind of freezes also used to happen when I had moments where I thought the FSB could take anything, I thought it had to be a problem with memory or CPU. (btw: Windows didn't show one of those popups with 'Your system has recovered from a serious error', which I could then send and find out more about what was causing it)
When I found out it wasn't actually caused by neither one of these I decided to format my second hard drive, which only had about 3% free space. The defragingtool (O&O Defrag) started analysing and concluded that the degree of fragmentation was 20.8% and it started moving files.
But.... after just 30 seconds.. another freeze. I rebooted and tryed again.. and freeze again.
Conclusion: Something wrong with harddrive.
I then tried to use the windows chkdsk during startup to fix possible errors on the drive, but it also caused a freeze (at phase 2, 69%).
After that I tryed to move and delete lots of GB from the disk that were heavily fragmented (defragmenting didn't work so..). But doing this also caused a freeze.
I decided to look in the eventlog whether there were any reports of hardware problems since Windows didn't gave me one of those popups.
There were lots of warnings and errors visible but I wasn't sure whether they all had something to do with the possibly foulty harddrive. What I then did was starting the defragging tool and remembering the time I started it. The PC freezed, of course, and rebooted. After rebooting I opened the eventviewer again and it displayed the following (on the time remembered):
Error 51 and 26:
* Eventviewer reports Harddisk1, which is my second harddisk of 320gb which's pretty new.
* No idea what piece of hardware is connected to IDE2, the second harddisk is on SATA.
Also found this, few days earlier (could not remember what I was doing at the time, guess nothing, apart from sleeping) :
Error 56 meant:
I downloaded a tool to make a performance check on the harddisks. It reported my first hard disk (which is about 2.5 years old, more information at the end of this post) to have a reliability of 70% due to a slow spin up but 0% of reading/writing errors.
The disk that is giving me a headache got
100/0% = perfect.
There isn't any more information I got about the problem apart from my system specs of course so here they are:
Windows XP SP2 (
installed on the first 120gb drive, not the 'defect' one of 320gb, pagefile is also located on this 120gb drive)
Pentium 4 HT 2.6ghz (clocked to 2.8 or 3.2)
1024mb DDR400
Asus P4P800 SE
(AX800Pro 256mb, 500mhz core, directX9.0C)
And most important, the harddisks:
WD Caviar WD1200BB-22DAA0,
IDE, 2 partitions of about 30 and 90 gb, making 120 gb. About 2.5-3 years old. 20% free space. Total time on: 470 days
WD Caviar WD3200JD-00KLB0,
SATA-1 , 1 partition of 320gb. About 0.5 - 1 years old. 3% free space. Air cooled and avarage temperature at 29 c. Total time on: 137 days. Used extensively about 6-8 hours a day for downloading, writing to dvd, downloading, etc.
* They are not in RAID
* Both are 7200 rpm 's
I'm not sure what kind of problem it is so.. could be the harddisk itself, bad sectors, or something with the drivers accessing it.
Formatting is not an option I'm afraid.. too much valuable data (about 300 gb of it). If I could format I would have done it earlier.
Anyway, thanks for taking time for reading this extremely long post and hope someone has an anwser.
Linear Mode
