Accessing hard drive freezes system

[BreakAes]

Hi,

I've been having a very annoying problem with my computer recently where it will freeze every short while. It freezes and the hard drive access light comes on. After the light goes off the system will unfreeze. Most of the time I can still move the cursor around and bring opened programs to the foreground, but it seems like anything that requires access to the hard disc will get stuck.

I'm wondering if the drive is dying. I've turned off the paging file and I have 3.5 GB of RAM. I've run antivirus and antimalware scans so I don't think malicious software is the problem. The OS is Windows 7 32bit Ultimate.

This is a new issue, and the drive is old. I've had strange problems before when the power supply is going bad, but I don't think I've had this specific issue. I haven't tested the power supply yet though.

Also, the other day I got the first BSOD that I can remember. It happened when I was running an antivirus scan, although I'm not sure if that matters.

I just checked the Event Viewer and there are a bunch of atapi errors (Event ID: 11).

Any thoughts? Thanks!

 

[Lutfij]

did you google in the error code to see what the error really is?

besides that, did you happen to see a BSOD error code; 0x0000000F4? that would indicate a faulty HDD. I just went through it with a seagate 250GB SATA Drive.

AND, welcome tot the forums newcomer!

 

[apache_lives]

BSOD codes are rubbish seriously ignore them

test your hardware (especially prime, furmark, hdtune, memtest etc)

if it all passes its your install/software - do a FRESH install

why are you using a 32-bit install? no reason to stay 32-bit

 

[tokencode]

Quick question, do you have a RAID controller in place at all or any storage devices that require drivers? Is it possibly a driver issue?

 

[Lutfij]

drivers don't cause this kind of issue. Its a hardware failure form the mobo sata ports, other hardware connected to mobo or simply a failing HDD as the OP has mentioned the drive is old/aging.

about the error report; http://i1013.photobucket.com/albums/af254/Jaquith/Event_Manager.jpg look in the critical tab and also the error tab and then look for the times that the pc didn't boot up or was in lock up and then google in the error code you find in it. You'll surely come up with answers and a solution to solve this problem.

 

[tokencode]

not true, if you have the wrong driver for a storage device and go to access it, it can absolutely cause a BSOD.

 

[BreakAes]

I don't think it's a driver issue. Everything worked fine for probably over a year. I think it's probably that something's failing, and if I had to take a guess it would be the drive.