Rig Locking Up.

[Acebeans]

I've had my rig for a while now and haven't not ran into any problems at all with it. But, after coming back to it after being without power for a couple days I'm having some problems.

It has locked up on me several times while playing D3, by locking up I mean that game will completely freeze, I'm disconnected from skype right away and I can't cntrl-alt-delete or anything. I have to reboot the rig from the power on the PC. When I am just using Windows and browsing the internet there doesn't seem to be any issues but when I go to boot up a large file from my mechanical HDD it will lock up again. Anytime I try to boot up Tera which is a 30+ gig file the PC will freeze right away.

I've been monitoring the GPU's and the CPU's temps and they all seem to be within range. I have two 560 ti's in SLI but like I said haven't really had any issues with them or anything else.

There was a very bad storm here a couple days ago that did some weird things with the power and it was out for an entire two days. I do have everything on my computer plugged into a surge protector except I don't have the LAN routed through a surge protector but I'm hoping that the storm didn't fry any of my components.

I was thinking that maybe the HDD is going bad? I have an SSD that I could try to load some programs on and see how they work from there. Like I said Windows seems to be working fine while I'm surfing or just doing normal things but when I goto load up a game it will freeze completely. Although I have been able to load up D3 but it will essentially lock up after playing it for a while.

Anyone have any suggestions?

Rig Specs:
i5-2500k
ASrock P67 Extreme 3 Gen4
8 GB G Skill Ram
64 GBB SSD Crucial
500 GB Hitachi on the cheap HDD
560 ti's in SLI Asus
Corsiar TX750M PSU

 

[thedeathclox]

I've had my rig for a while now and haven't not ran into any problems at all with it. But, after coming back to it after being without power for a couple days I'm having some problems.

It has locked up on me several times while playing D3, by locking up I mean that game will completely freeze, I'm disconnected from skype right away and I can't cntrl-alt-delete or anything. I have to reboot the rig from the power on the PC. When I am just using Windows and browsing the internet there doesn't seem to be any issues but when I go to boot up a large file from my mechanical HDD it will lock up again. Anytime I try to boot up Tera which is a 30+ gig file the PC will freeze right away.

I've been monitoring the GPU's and the CPU's temps and they all seem to be within range. I have two 560 ti's in SLI but like I said haven't really had any issues with them or anything else.

There was a very bad storm here a couple days ago that did some weird things with the power and it was out for an entire two days. I do have everything on my computer plugged into a surge protector except I don't have the LAN routed through a surge protector but I'm hoping that the storm didn't fry any of my components.

I was thinking that maybe the HDD is going bad? I have an SSD that I could try to load some programs on and see how they work from there. Like I said Windows seems to be working fine while I'm surfing or just doing normal things but when I goto load up a game it will freeze completely. Although I have been able to load up D3 but it will essentially lock up after playing it for a while.

I think you pretty much hit the nail on the head with that last bit. It sounds like your HDD is starting to fail. Also, just to let you know you dont need to tell us that its a mechanical hard drive; a hard drive is ALWAYS mechanical. An SSD is its own device, we know.

When a HDD begins failing, sometimes its in one specific sector. This dead spot will continue to worsen and grow over time and you will notice degredation of stability and perforance, and eventually the clicks of death from the drive. Your hard drive is attempting to access drive, some magnet may have come too close for comfort, or maybe just luck of the draw and the drive just decided to die on you. Either way, run a check disk on bootup (you'll have to tell windows to do this, and it will perform its job on bootup.) Hopefully, windows will mark the bad sectors off and stay away from it giving you a bit more time to backup your information.

Should the dying sector actually be.. well.. a dying sector causing these problems, then I would hurry and get things replaced and backed up.

Now, there is also the chance that I am so wrong that I look really stupid here.. but im pretty confident that your disk is boned. Best of luck!

 

[Acebeans]

I think you pretty much hit the nail on the head with that last bit. It sounds like your HDD is starting to fail. Also, just to let you know you dont need to tell us that its a mechanical hard drive; a hard drive is ALWAYS mechanical. An SSD is its own device, we know.

When a HDD begins failing, sometimes its in one specific sector. This dead spot will continue to worsen and grow over time and you will notice degredation of stability and perforance, and eventually the clicks of death from the drive. Your hard drive is attempting to access drive, some magnet may have come too close for comfort, or maybe just luck of the draw and the drive just decided to die on you. Either way, run a check disk on bootup (you'll have to tell windows to do this, and it will perform its job on bootup.) Hopefully, windows will mark the bad sectors off and stay away from it giving you a bit more time to backup your information.

Should the dying sector actually be.. well.. a dying sector causing these problems, then I would hurry and get things replaced and backed up.

Now, there is also the chance that I am so wrong that I look really stupid here.. but im pretty confident that your disk is boned. Best of luck!

I've been playing D3 for the past 4-6 hour on and off. It's now back to being smooth like it was before I starting having this issue. I didn't change anything or do anything different I was just testing somethings out to see if I could get some more information on the cause of the lock up's. I've been able to load up Tera now and play without any issues. Throughout the evening I've been able to shut down and re-load D3 with zero lock up's.

But, in my experience with something like this where I had issues they are going to appear again probably sooner rather than later. I would like to get ahead of it before it ends up causing me some major headaches.

I had Windows run it's check disk and there were no errors found on the HDD. Not sure where to go from here, I'm still not certain it isn't the HDD but I guess it's possible it could be the ram? I know failure rate on ram is very low but I guess it's possible.

Obviously the best case scenario is that there was just something funky going on at the time but that's probably wishful thinking.

What do you think?

Thanks so much for the help.