Stabwound

So... my sig rig has started acting up badly. The hard drive itself is only about 3 months old.

About a week ago my whole computer started freezing up randomly, not completely frozen but with disk access and the spinning blue circle cursor (I guess this is the same as the hour glass in XP). I can move the mouse around but clicking things on the task bar etc will do nothing. Also, the processor usage/RAM usage is low during this, at like 1-2%. The most aggravating thing is that these freezes can last up to like 60+ seconds.

This problem is most apparent with using Firefox, and it'll freeze up all the time. It also does this if I'm browsing the drive. The weird thing is that if I play a game it doesn't freeze at all and works perfectly, the game drive being another partition on the hard disk.

When I watch the resource manager, the disk access goes nuts when this happens, fully maxed out, and when the freeze stops it goes back to normal again.

I tried reinstalling Windows 7 (without format, though) and it didn't help at all. I also just did a disk scan through Windows on drive C and it didn't detect any bad sectors or errors whatsoever. I'm currently scanning the game partition but I doubt it's going to find anything.

Any have any clues at all? I'm thinking of just RMAing this piece of junk.

sigh.

nolonger

Sounds like a dying HDD to me, RMA!

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Stabwound

Yeah, I might do that, but I was just wondering if there was maybe something wrong other than the drive itself and thought maybe someone here might know or have a suggestion. I'm just assuming it's the hard drive, but I don't really know how to deduce whether it is or not.

nolonger

Test with another hard drive if you can, or just load up Linux in a Flash drive and see if that gets lock-ups too. If it doesn't, you can pretty much assume it's the hard drive.

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