WIN7 SP1 x64
i5 2320 3GHz
8GB RAM

about 3 - 4days ago, i had just finished a recording session and was about to play-back the recording when my DAW crashed (i was using Audition 3 at the moment) and locked up my whole PC. i rebooted and ever since then when it boots, it takes minutes (instead of seconds) to even load my sign on screen. it also takes longer to access external drives now, but once i gain access to the drive, things move at a normal pace. i dug around the web and found that it could be an issue with the chipset version, but i don't know enough about these things to be confident in a solution, so here i am...

i've never had an issue like this before and i can sure use some great advice now from you guys/gals. if any more info is needed, please ask and i'll provide any info necessary.

thanks ahead of time...
Beanz

 

did you check avast or security stuff u have?

open up your msconfig

Deactivate all tasks you do not need in autostart. can you make
screenshots of your task manager /processes?

 

will definitely do that and report back. however, i do disconnect from the web and disable my antivirus before i open my DAW, if that info is relevant to the situation. i'm gonna post those screenshots soon. thanks!

 

Format C:

 

My advice: Stop using your computer, take out your internal drive and clone it immediately.

To elaborate, this could easily be a symptom of a failing drive, and you should back it up before its potentially immanent death. Yes, I could be wrong, but better safe than sorry.

Either mount the drive as an internal non-boot drive in a desktop, or if this is your only computer (or you only have another laptop) then leave the drive in but boot from USB flash or CD/DVD. Clone the internal drive to a spare HDD, preferably another internal, but an external USB HDD will also do.

 

Last edited: Jan 9, 2018

I was thinking exactly the same. Things go slow at the opening because your computer is trying to reach damaged sectors of the hard drive.
Backup everything important for you while you can.

 

yup need to do scandisk in dos mode look for bad sectors on hard drive when pc freezes you usally mess your hd up

 

I agree with Rasputin & Olymoon, make a backup asap!
Can you hear some "new" noises frome your PC since the failure?

 

I mean this might be a tad obvious and I apologize I don't mean to insult your intelligence but it happened to me..Do you keep the inside of the computer clean? I would dust out my computer regularly but neglect to really get into the cpu and heatsink area just because theres a lot of nooks and crannies. Then my computer began starting much slower than it should. So one day I went all the way in and took the heatsink off and cleaned the crap out of it and around the cpu and reapplied thermal paste and put the heatsink back on and it's been running great ever since.

I know this is kind of basic and I do agree with everyone that it's probably a good idea to copy all your important files but I was having a similar issue and this worked for me

 

Check drive health w/ http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/index-e.html

 

As the system is unstable and further use might do even more damage i recommend using a live distro of parted magic instead of windows in order to pin point the problem. Hard lockups might also be a memory issue, they appear randomly as soon the system tries to access the bad block in your ram, it happened to me lately - had to replace the bad modules and everything was fine again. I noticed as the BIOS reported a RAM value different from what was installed. Bios reported 16G (dimm 0-3), but there was 24G (dimm 0-5) - for me it was obvious there was something wrong with it.

1. Backup your data, just your data.
2. Remove any additional Hardware that is not required to run the system, additional RAM (important)
3. Test your drive
4. If drive is OK, test RAM, add additional RAM modules one by one and test them again
5. If RAM is OK, replace your PSU

If everything is fine, reinstall windows as it might be the culprit aswell

 

I have read above me and there is some good advice there. However, the very first thing i would do, is perform a 'system restore' directly back to before the crash happened. If this works, you know it was a software issue!

If that doesn't work, my next thought would be, the crash might have caused a sector on the hard drive to go bad, thus preventing something booting up properly. However, there is a piece of software called HDD Regenerator seen here:-
(http://www.dposoft.net/hdd.html)

Which will repair bad sectors without you needing to remove anything. If the first step doesn't work, you can pm me we'll go from there!

 

Last edited: Jan 10, 2018

so far, this is what i got after i used HDD regenerator:

Hard Drive parameters changed

Attr 9
Power-On Hours changed from 17797 to 17798

Attr 190
Temperature Difference from 100 changed
[31 49 0] -> [30 49 0]

i have no idea what this means...

 

the post above this is about the SSD drive that has all my studio software in it. this info came back for my OS drive:

Hard Drive parameters changed

Attr 190
Temperature Difference from 100 changed
[30 50 0] -> [31 50 0]

 

another result poped up for my studio drive with a different reading:

Hard Drive parameters changed

Attr 190
Temperature Difference from 100 changed
[37 49 0] -> [38 49 0]

help translating this info would be appreciated.

 

Woah a sec, that's why i said 'pm me' if the system restore never worked. This software is a an absolute beast, and I only use two aspects of it.

1) Scan for any bad sectors
2) repair any bad sectors

I don't touch anything else. I'm going to look into what you might have changed and see if there is a way to put it back!


Which demo version did you download?
What specifically did you run?

 

Last edited: Jan 10, 2018

Nothing wrong. What is displayed is your hard drive has been in use for one more hour than before you started, and it has heated up because of the scan.. Both those attributes are perfectly normal.


Is the scan still running?

 

about the inbox thing...i guess that's the 'start a conversation' choice?? if so, i just started one with you.

i've never 'inboxed' anyone before in the forum...pardon my ignorance. i've only ever posted directly to threads.

don't laugh at me...lol

 

As if i would laugh? would this face lie? <<<<<

 

As rasputin said!

First things first guys. Before fiddeling and starting to repair the damn thing, first do a backup of every byte of value on all the disks!

The symptoms say, one or more (most likely the system) disk is about to die. In an hour or a day, who knows?! No time for playing around.