What is Going on? Win 10 1909 on two machines slows to a crawl

SonicMojo · 22 Feb 2020

All

Discovered two Win 10 v1909 machines started displaying the same bizarre lock/freeze/hang pretty much at the same time.

Symptoms are the same for both - boot up, work on the machine for 5-10 minutes and all of sudden everything grinds to a halt. Hard freeze. Cannot bring up Task Manager or Event Viewer without waiting for 3 minutes.

When I finally get into Task Manager - it shows 100% CPU but lists every process at 0%

When I finally did get into Event Manager - it is litter with this ESENT 532 crap:

wuaueng.dll (2648,D,0) SUS20ClientDataStoresvchost (3872,D,0) SRUJet: A request to read from the file "C:\windows\system32\SRU\SRUDB.dat" at offset 327680 (0x0000000000050000) for 4096 (0x00001000) bytes has not completed for 36 second(s). This problem is likely due to faulty hardware. Please contact your hardware vendor for further assistance diagnosing the problem.DllHost (9756,D,0)

Microsoft.Windows.Cortana_cw5n1h2txyewy_NOEDP_LEGACY_IDB: A request to read from the file "C:\Users\Lxxx\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.Windows.Cortana_cw5n1h2txyewy\AppData\Indexed DB\IndexedDB.edb" at offset 131072 (0x0000000000020000) for 32768 (0x00008000) bytes has not completed for 36 second(s). This problem is likely due to faulty hardware. Please contact your hardware vendor for further assistance diagnosing the problem.

wuaueng.dll (88,D,0) SUS20ClientDataStore: A request to read from the file "C:\windows\SoftwareDistribution\DataStore\DataStore.edb" at offset 77365248 (0x00000000049c8000) for 16384 (0x00004000) bytes has not completed for 36 second(s). This problem is likely due to faulty hardware. Please contact your hardware vendor for further assistance diagnosing the problem.

I have rolled back the most recent Windows Update (02-2020) and did a system Restore on both (via Macrium Reflect) essentially going back a week - but to no avail.

Anyone have any idea what is going on? I was thinking maybe power supply - but on two machines at the same time? Hard disks checkout fine. Ran DISM and sfc/scannow on both - no issues coming back.

Maybe Windows Search or WU are screwed up somehow. Ran both troubleshooters with no real indicators.

Stumped and annoyed.

Sonic.

dalchina · 23 Feb 2020

Hi, are the two machines identical - hardware and software configuration?

Windows Search, when operating normally, uses no resources when not indexing. Sometimes, if there is file system corruption, it can get hung up and use excessive resources I believe, but that would be obvious from your task manager.

It sounds unlikely to be related to WU given the other reports.
[QUOTE]A request to read from the file "C:\windows\SoftwareDistribution\DataStore\DataStore.edb" at offset 77365248 (0x00000000049c8000) for 16384 (0x00004000) bytes has not completed for 36 second(s). This problem is likely due to faulty hardware. Please contact your hardware vendor for further assistance diagnosing the problem.[/QUOTE

Does sound more like hardware as you've restored from a disk image, but that would be strange given two machines show this.

Might be that both have had the same Windows Update- e.g. a driver. Check your Update History- esp. drivers at the bottom.

I suggest you try
Hard Disk Sentinel (trial) - SSDs too. This gives the best instant comment in English I know- right on the GUI. Check what it says for each disk.

SonicMojo · 25 Feb 2020

dalchina

Found the issue here - turned out to be a SATA cable (and most likely a bad version of an app we use to maintain our desktop endpoints).

I swapped out the cables on this suspect machine and uninstalled this desktop agent and the machine is back to normal.

Sonic.

dalchina · 25 Feb 2020

well done- did Hard Disk Sentinel help? I was quite surprised in one case when it did diagnose a cable issue.