Solved Secondary hard drive causing freezing issues/lock ups

Hi guys,

A couple of months ago I built a new system and made the jump to Windows 8.

Everything runs great apart from one thing - my secondary hard drive (which is the old one from my old rig) is having issues, which I am now only using for all my less-important programs, and movies, games and general files.

Whenever I open up the drive in Computer or Explorer, it will lock up the window/freeze for 10-20 seconds before returning to normal, in which I can then use it again. It will work for normally for around 5-10 minutes before the lockup returns.

* I have the hard drive split into two partitions. Both do the same thing.

Thanks in advance,
Josh

Hello Josh, and welcome to Eight Forums.

It sounds like you have your power plan settings set to turn off your hard disks after being idle for the 5-10 minutes. The tutorial below can help show you how to turn off and stop this.
Hope this helps,
Shawn

What Shawn suggests is good practice, I set my drives to auto sleep after 30 minutes.

I am having the same issue on my Media System, which has had 8 installed as long as this one. I use that system to hotswap SATA drives all the time. And right now I am having issues with a Seagate 1 TB drive I just added.

There are some things you can do to ensure correct drive operation, and the first is to start with replacing all of your SATA data cables, buy some good ones that snap in tight. Also, go to Radio Shack and buy quick evaporating Contact Cleaner, and spray all of the contacts on your SATA sockets on both the Hard Drives and the Board. I do this about once every 4 months.

Then snap the new cables in. If any of the drives are IDE do the same thing, Cables and Clean.

It is also equally important to keep an eye especially on older hard drives, and test them at least once a month. I use Hiren's Boot CD, you can download it from my link below.

You boot to the CD, then go into DOS programs and then HARD DRIVE TOOLS. In there, are several very good hard drive testing tools, I use GWscan because I have WD and Seagate drives, GWscan can check both of them.

I would do this, I would run a GWscan on your old HD and check it for Read Element Failure. GWscan will tell you if you need to run a full scan, if it says so, then run it and it will clean up any problems with the MBR and close off any bad sectors. Don't fret if your drive says it has "Bad Sectors", sometimes you can clear those out by zero-writing the drive.

In your place with those issues, I would do all of these things, replace Cable, clean the contacts, and run a Drive Scan.

When you are done with GWscan, you can boot to Mini XP which is also on the CD, and run CHKDSK from there, and it will at least show you the progress of the scan, and it's the same scan that;s in Windows 8 so if it fixes drive problems, Windows 8 will boot without doing an Auto Diag.

It is also possible that your Old Drive needs to be Optimized, I use Windows 8 to do it, every day at Midnight, but a better program is Raxco Perfect Disk- You can use it free for 30 days, and can download it right from the website.

Thanks for the replies, guys.

Very embarrassing, I figured it was power related but I could have sworn I changed my power plan to High performance when I first installed, but it seems I didn't. The HD was indeed turning itself off.

Thanks!

Don't be embarrassed. It happens to all of us. Glad to hear that you got it sorted.