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OK - confusing drive/OS issue - HELP!!!

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  • Windows 7
Last response: in Windows 7
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February 15, 2010 7:34:55 PM

Hi all - long time reader, but first post, so please excuse any idiotic moments - got a problem here that I'm utterly baffled by.


Just bought Windows 7 and components for a new machine, and a bizarre issue has cropped up.

Spec is Intel i7 960, Evga X58 Classified mobo, 12 gig kingston hyperx RAM, system drive is a Velociraptor 10k rpm, and I have three project drives which are Samsung F3s (these have worked well for me for audio in the past). Sound card is an RME HDSP 9652.

I installed as usual, downloaded latest 64 bit drivers for mobo, sound card, networking etc. etc.

Booted fine, worked like a charm, detected all drives...all happy.

Went through doing a bunch of optimising tweaks for audio / Cubase 5 use - disabling Windows Defender, setting processor scheduling to background services etc. etc., and set the page file to 18.5 gig on one of the Samsung drives that also contains sample data (as this loads into RAM by and large and streams, so figured this was a better drive than system for the page file).

Rebooted a few times, all fine. Made no other alterations.

Now I boot to find that it hangs after the classpnp.sys driver is loaded. Not precisely sure what driver follows after that...

Well - sort of hangs. If I leave it for about half an hour it finally boots into OS and all seems fine and happy. That'd be great if I never ever wanted to reboot again, but...

I tried many of the suggestions found googling and searching around here for that...I disabled ACPI APIC in the bios - nothing (enabling the 64 bit alternative - is it HFET? Or whatever that is called, 32 bit or 64 bit neither boots any faster, still takes a half hour). I tried disabling the sound card, and all USB - no luck.

BUT If I remove the sata cables from the three Samsung drives, it boots normally. But I know the Samsung drives are ok - they are brand new, chkdsk runs fine and Samsung's HUTIL says they are fine too. If I connect just one of the Samsung drives - any of them - it takes half an hour, hanging after classpnp.sys.

And to make it more annoying, Windows 7 commercials are coming on every commercial break on the Olympics, which is bloody annoying when you're sitting looking.

Any ideas on how I can fix this preferably without an OS reinstall? I spent a hell of a lot of time getting things set up, and have projects looming...this seems like something tiny, and fixable, and I can't believe this would require a completely new OS reinstall.

With many thanks for any suggestions!

More about : confusing drive issue

a c 209 $ Windows 7
February 15, 2010 8:19:13 PM

When you've got the Samsung drives connected and have Windows up and running (after the 30-minute boot), are there any yellow flags that show up for the disks or controllers in Device Manager? Any suspicious errors in the System event log?
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February 16, 2010 5:13:49 PM

Thanks for reply.

No yellow flags.

I reran Samsungs utilities, and discovered one drive doing something weird (LBA errors). To the point it won't let me reformat it. Suspecting faulty MBR on that one perhaps, so left it off. Ran Spinrite on remainder - no problems detected.

But even with what seems like potentially faulty drive disconnected (brand new, but guess it could have gone) - the boot time is still glacial, a good half hour. Does anybody know what driver is loaded immediately after classpnp.sys?

System Event log does have some errors.

event 11 The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk1\DR1

and sporadically

"Performance power management features on processor 1 in group 0 are disabled due to a firmware problem. Check with the computer manufacturer for updated firmware."

Although I believe this is because I have a lot of the power management features disabled, I guess this is a speedstep thing and is unrelated.\

A couple of times on boots from yesterday this shows up:

Event 1 VDS Basic Provider - Unexpected failure. Error code: D@01010004


Also yesterday afternoon there is one other error code in the event log:

"A timeout (30000 milliseconds) was reached while waiting for a transaction response from the ShellHWDetection service."


Beyond that, no errors other than the processor power management, which I'm discounting.



The computer boots perfectly with just the system drive and all other components enabled - and I'm typing from it now.

I will try connecting the drives whilst booted now to the sata ports and doing a plug and play search in device manager to see if they can be detected and run chkdsk.
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a c 209 $ Windows 7
February 16, 2010 7:04:28 PM

I don't really know what the issue would be, but it would probably be wise to move the pagefile off the Samsung drive. The system won't go anywhere if it's having issues with the drive that holds the pagefile.
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February 16, 2010 7:11:29 PM

Ok - bizarre solution just worked. Removed the page file back to C:. Then got annoyed in general, took all the cables out of the system and recabled from scratch, resat the graphics cards and RAM.

And hey presto....it boots. No issues. Reformatted drive that was unhappy, retested...no bad sectors, HUTIL tests it as perfect, no issues.

I'm thinking it was now possibly a power supply issue that was causing intermittent drive drop outs on the page file drive, and other symptoms were just related but not directly affecting the issue; the page file was probably the cause. Not sure why the Samsung utility got bad sector reads in the MBR, but that could be power related too. Just goes to show...just because it looks like a hardware death, it could ALWAYS be power related.

Anyway - SOLVED!



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a c 209 $ Windows 7
February 16, 2010 11:28:42 PM

Congratulations, and thanks for letting us know how you solved it!
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!