computer freezing

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This bad HD is totally backed up, so I can just use a different HD to replace it and retire it.

Surprisingly, when I went over to my already booted up computer. I opened Chrome and the Disk never went to 100%, although the power usage did get to very high while loading the tabs, then both went down. So far no more freezes.

Thursday before all of this serious freezing started, I downloaded a 700mg Zip file to the bad HD. It took forever to download. Friday when things were the worst with the freezing, I tried to unzip that file and it took a very long time and I gave up and put that HD in my upstairs computer. It was still very slow at unzipping, so I just downloaded wetransfer again and it unzipped fast on my upstairs computer. So I think part of this erratic computer freezing was caused in part by the bad HD. What can be causing this unusual very high power usage?

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zbook said:

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Is this only related to this bad HD?

I've noticed event ID153(I/O Retries) and ID40(Corruption on Disk) in event viewer whilst scanning the surface of my disks using Victoria HDD Troubleshooting software. The miniport driver(under Universal Serial Bus Controllers in Device Manager) notices timeout errors while doing read/write operations like scanning the hard drive for errors. It logs event ID153 in event viewer Notifying you that the read/write operation is going to be retried. After several of these Timeout errors occur, the Storport Driver(Under Storage Controllers in Device Manager) resets the USB port trying to correct the timeouts. This causes corruption on the disk. I should note that Victoria software notices the timeouts and then shortly thereafter there are I/O errors reading the disk. Which is evidence of the port being reset and the drive being disconnected during the read/write operation. This may not be related but I just thought I'd drop my two cents in. My issue is with USB connected drive and his is Internal HDD. But it might be something to consider. The report by HDS states that there were problems communicating with the host reported so I would investigate controller issues as some have mentioned.

Thanks Bostongc, sounds interesting. How do I investigate controller issues?

Currently, I have only 1 internal HD with a partition. My extra data HD is the one that we found out was bad. I have it in my upstairs main computer, putting together the future replacement for the bad HD. I tried copying some files from the bad HD to some other ones and it was extremely slow and usually ended up reporting too many failed file transfers, so I stopped even trying.

So the point is I had this bad HD in my downstairs computer for a very long time and it may have been causing the freezes and erratic behavior. Because since I got rid of it things are much better. Yet I still get the high 100% Disk and very high power usage looking at task manager, but these are short lived. They both go very high while opening Chrome, but then calm down

GerryPeters said:

Thanks Bostongc, sounds interesting. How do I investigate controller issues?

Currently, I have only 1 internal HD with a partition. My extra data HD is the one that we found out was bad. I have it in my upstairs main computer, putting together the future replacement for the bad HD. I tried copying some files from the bad HD to some other ones and it was extremely slow and usually ended up reporting too many failed file transfers, so I stopped even trying.

So the point is I had this bad HD in my downstairs computer for a very long time and it may have been causing the freezes and erratic behavior. Because since I got rid of it things are much better. Yet I still get the high 100% Disk and very high power usage looking at task manager, but these are short lived. They both go very high while opening Chrome, but then calm down

So to answer your question about how do i troubleshoot controller issues - it sound like you already check the data and power cables if I read some of your previous posts correctly. So the next step would be to look at device manager and look at your sata controller under IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers and check if there are any updates to the driver for that controller or possibly use an older controller drive that you know works with your hardware (such as the original controller that came with your computer) If you still have problems with 100% drive usage after that then I would do a fresh clean install of the latest version of your OS (remember to backup first) and check if the 100% drive problem re occurs. if it is okay then you can check if any windows updates cause the problem to re occur later. Also check if your BIOS is the latest version available from you manufacturer and update it if you can. And when you posted the reliability reports there was one user who said it was your video card malfunctioning so you might try to get a cheap video card and test with it. Just my general thoughts! I know it can be irritating when you have computer problems but I look at it this way, the fun is in the details of searching and learning everything you can about your computer and that way you become expert about your system in the process. And to recover the files from you damaged partition I would recommend some recovery software I used GetDataBack on my recently deleted video collection when I clean installed windows it deleted the drive I had my videos on but that software let me recover my video's thank god!

I did update my video card driver 2 days ago. You said check if there are any updates to the driver for that controller or possibly use an older controller drive that you know works with your hardware (such as the original controller that came with your computer). Should there be a flag at a controller that needs updating? Is the original controller a piece of hardware or software? Here's a screenshot of my device manager.

Well that makes sense your disk is running in IDE mode on the controller, you need to enable AHCI in the bios and you will also have to do a registry tweak in windows for windows to see the drive as AHCI or you will get a inaccessible error when windows tries to load the hard drive.
You would want to do the reg tweak first and then reboot to bios and then turn on AHCI in there.

Because your drives are running in IDE mode you lose Native Command Queuing which optimizes storage mediums and their read and write order of operations, which effects performance.

When i mentioned id be checking the controller earlier in the thread this is what i was referring to.

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Bostongc said:

I have never seen that many IDE/ATA Controllers in a system

Its because IDE uses ATA bus logic and its slow. Essentially all the ATA devices in that image are buses and those are used to send data around the hard drive and system etc. Its slow for this reason and most likely the problem here its the system we used when we were still using IDE ribbons so like 30 years ago.

Great find! Thanks. How do I do the registry tweak in windows for windows to see the drive as AHCI? I replaced my other 1500 gig SATA HD with a 500 gig IDE. I use the IDE primarily as storage. It's working fine with the SATA HD currently.

I didn't have to do the registry hack my system that is 6 years old saw the drives as AHCI as soon as I change the settings in BIOS to AHCI warning though if you change the setting in BIOS and your computer won't boot you will have to re-install windows with AHCI enabled to get it to boot so make a backup of your working os BEFORE you change the BIOS