Strange hard disk behaviours...

[spoRv]

Lately I experienced a lot of crashes, and I thought it was due to hard tasks asked to my poor old PC, using too much filters on a single avisynth script... then, crashes occur also not using avisynth... and I'm starting to think about the causes.

I'm pretty sure now that the guilty is an HDD; easy, you can think, but the fact is, it's not a single, whole disk, but just a partition; I was forced to make two logical partitions, due to the fact Windows XP can't "see" disks bigger than 2GB; the strange fact is the other partition seems to work well!

Something that happens:

• disk is usually very slow during writing, exept with some softwares - TSmuxeR is blazing fast! Some example? 28hrs to rip a 30GB BD, 10+hrs to split a 3GB file in 100MB chunks using 7zip... and keep crashing... using another drive, times dropped to around 1.5hrs for BD rip, and few minutes for the file division!
  
• some files are impossible to delete! They seems to be used by some programs, but that's not true...
  
• copying from/to it takes forever
  
• strangely, using this partition doesn't affect the capture quality, maybe because it's relatively slow.
  

I noted something just at the beginning; I even tried to format the partition, or recreate it, without success, it seems... I think that, if used with a newer OS, it will work perfectly, so it's what I have intention to do in the near future.

Anyone experienced something similar?

[jerryshadoe]

In my experience, what you are describing sounds like one of three things:

- failing hard drive

- extremely fragmented drive (have you tried to de-frag the drive/partition in question?)

- your computer might be infected with some kind of spyware/malware

The last one happened to me about two years ago and I got rid of the problem using TrendMicro's Housecall utility which is available free (just google it)

[DoomBot]

Check the HDD with CrystalDiskInfo http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/...kinfo.html

[spoRv]

Thanks for the input, Jerry! My thoughts:

1) it should not be the case; it was bought brand new a year or two ago, and the problems started the day I used it, still, the other partition is working well; so, it should not be hardware

2) fragmented, could be; but the others are certainly worst in this matter, still work very well

3) i have contracted one for sure - it keeps open some web pages randomly, but I'm too lazy to find a way to extirpate it; currently trying the software you pointed me to, but I'm pretty sure I used before without results... free alternatives? I thought also to use ComboFix, but a bit scaried to make a mess with it...

[jerryshadoe]

The ONLY way to get TrendMicro's Housecall to actually uncover and fix the problems (at least based on my experience since the app was in beta) is to do a FULL scan, which depending on size of your HDDs can take a long time to do. I suggest starting it before you go to sleep and it should be done by time you get up

EDIT: if your computer is already opening random webpages, then you are INFECTED my friend and you should fix that ASAP. For one, this way you don't risk your system being further damaged AND it will speed up your computer which is already struggling to keep up with the projects you "throw" at it...

[spoRv]

HouseCall found two problems and resolved it; let's see if everything go well in the next days...

[jerryshadoe]

That was fast. Hopefully that helps resolve your issues

[spoRv]

Hope so!

[Feallan]

MBR, which is what XP 32-bit uses, limits your hard drive size to 2 TB (assuming 512 byte cluster). That applies to the ENTIRE disk, number of partitions doesn't matter. It is possible to put a second MBR after a 2TB partition, tricking Windows into believing there are two physical drives, which is probably what you did - but the HDD controller on your motherboard, or its drivers, may not like that at all. If your PC is old, this is not something it was supposed to do.

If one of your partitions work normally, and you've had this problem since the disk was new, I highly doubt it's failing.

[spoRv]

Yes, it should be like that, Feallan; old PCs don't like big disks!