Random PC Freezes and Slow Boot Up

[Jackrabbit69]

My PC has random freezes once I couldnt move my mouse and it didnt respond to ctrl-alt-delete. Now it seems to freeze for a bit and then it responds. Once it stopped responding while browsing files. Went into safe mode once didnt freeze.

Windows has been reporting on hard drive errors. Also my one drive an old IDE drive just with data on it showed up as having zero bytes free and zero bytes used. Had to use a program to restore it to normal. This is seperate to my system drive which has one partition for data and one for the OS.
Temperatures for CPU seem to be fine though it did record 80 degrees C once, average is around 40 degrees C.

Took out the graphics card to see if that was causing the freezing but to no avail. Seeing I have been getting no display from it. Using onboard Video at the moment.

Turned it on this morning and it took forever to load on the Windows logo and the welcome screen with freezes much more often. Wasnt able to do anything. Took out the old IDE hard drive with has been giving trouble. So far no freezes.

Could this be causing it to freeze and take forever to load even though this doesnt have my OS on it?

Specs are:

Gigabyte G31M-ES2C
Intel Core 2 Duo E7400 @ 2800 MHz
2048 MB (1 x 2048 DDR2)
SAMSUNG HD161HJ ATA Device (160GB)
Huntkey 350W Model: CP-350
Video Card : Intel(R) G33/G31 Express Chipset Family (Microsoft Corporation - WDDM 1.0) (Onboard Graphics as my Nvidia Geforce 220GT 1gig giving me trouble. Works for games etc. but generally if I shut down will show a blank screen after windows logo. Got the latest drivers installed).
Operating System : Windows 8.1 Pro (32-bit)


Recently formatted so dnt think its a software problems as all my hardware is old. Any help would be appreciated.

 

[norsestar]

Yes, a flaky data drive can cause freezes. If the drive is having trouble reading, it may retry until it reads the data correctly (which may be never, depending on the problem) or until it times out (which may be never, depending on the drive). Windows sits and waits for the data (which may be forever) before doing anything else, so it looks frozen.

You may not be accessing the data drive when it freezes, but that doesn't mean that Windows isn't touching it for some non-obvious reason...

 

[durgesh86]

Try running a chkdsk /r on the drives. It will recover readable data files and try to repair bad sectors. It might be able to solve your issue.

 

[Jackrabbit69]

Windows ran check disk at start up but will try again. Does it automatically run for all drives or do I need an extra command for that? Are third-party tools for checking errors not better? Also its been giving me errors when installing my graphics drivers and a game and had to undo changes to Windows update.

 

[Jackrabbit69]

Cant access cmd as administrator all it has is the icon for consent flashing in the taskbar and then I am unable to click on anything in the taskbar. Only responds to ctrl-alt-delete. No more freezes after i disconnected the other hard drive though but still loads the Windows logo slowly and installation problems.

 

[durgesh86]

Cant access cmd as administrator all it has is the icon for consent flashing in the taskbar and then I am unable to click on anything in the taskbar. Only responds to ctrl-alt-delete. No more freezes after i disconnected the other hard drive though but still loads the Windows logo slowly and installation problems.

Reboot into safe mode.
Else if you have a windows installation media...then go into Repair options> Advanced > and command prompt.
chkdsk /r run on the drive that you run it from or specify drive letter.
About the issue of Windows loading slowly, reboot in safe mode and if it loads okay then try uninstalling unwanted programs and applications which impact startup.
Regarding installation issue, Can you provide the errors that you get ?

 

[Jackrabbit69]

Did a system restore ending up getting a BSOD. Formatted back to Windows 7 and unplugged the hard drive giving me trouble so far so good

 

[durgesh86]

Did a system restore ending up getting a BSOD. Formatted back to Windows 7 and unplugged the hard drive giving me trouble so far so good

Looks like it was the HDD. If you still want to try, connect the HDD externally and run chkdsk /r on it. Should resolve most issues.
Also, next time (rather anytime) you get a BSOD do try to get the error message with the error code . Its something like 0xc0000005 OR 0x0000007B.....
These are very helpful to find the cause. In your case it might* have been the 7B which means HDD issues.

 

[Jackrabbit69]

Ran a check disk on the drive came up with no errors yet my PC froze accessing a file on it. Also when I was running it showed up as no bytes used no bytes free. Then it recovered. Well my graphics card is working on Windows 7 guess it didnt like 8.