System Crashes When Copying to External HD

tmp said:

Well, I crossed my fingers and went ahead with the recommended driver from nvidia. It is meant for the desktop version but I installed it anyway and my back-up went smooth and copying a large file-about 20GB-just to check, never put my cpu above 15% on it's own. I guess for now, problem solved. If anyone has a Geforce/nforce integrated card, the chipset driver I used was #15.37 for windows 7 x64. Thanks for all the help guys!!

Glad to hear the new drivers have seemingly done the trick :)

Hmm.. so installing new driver works for you?

Not in my case...

I have tried:
- nvidia official driver 15.37
- leaked driver 15.46 and 15.49
- all front and back USB ports

I guess I will wait for nvidia to release newer driver.

My desktop is Acer M5641, 630i nforce chipset, ATI 4670

fendytan said:

Hmm.. so installing new driver works for you?

Not in my case...

I have tried:
- nvidia official driver 15.37
- leaked driver 15.46 and 15.49
- all front and back USB ports

I guess I will wait for nvidia to release newer driver.

My desktop is Acer M5641, 630i nforce chipset, ATI 4670

Does your symptom also occur in safe mode? Do you also see "interrupts" listed as the cause of the high processor utilisation during the file copy?

Fendytan,
It's bizarre that the very driver built for your system worked for mine and not for yours?? I'm sure you've already checked but what about the bios??

H2SO4:
Safe mode can't detect my USB storage devices. So I can't really test it.

tmp:
I flashed my bios to the latest one from Acer already. The thing is Vista do not have this problem. So I think it's not bios problem, but Win7's...

I just installed a USB 2.0 PCI expansion card. Now, large files are copied just fine from internal HDD to external USB storage devices.

Well, now my laptops behavior has gotten more and more and more unstable with system freezes and crashes while doing simple things like browsing. Copying to externals no longer works, back to where I started, even re-installed the old chipset driver to see if it would calm things down.

The guys at Nvidia actually sent me to laptop2go as well and gave me a video driver with a modded inf but nothing on chipset. Didn't install the geforce driver because I don't have any issues with my display and am not a gamer so what would be the point in that? I'm also starting to wonder if the free nvidia software I downloaded is causing problems. Didn't use/need it before and since they are no help with driver updates, what's the point?

I'm now also wondering if this is a Windows 7 problem too-no issues in Vista. I really don't want to re-install Vista for a single issue but since that single issue is developing into a bigger and bigger problem, maybe that's my only option until Oct 22.

Anyone else having any luck?

tmp said:

Well, now my laptops behavior has gotten more and more and more unstable with system freezes and crashes while doing simple things like browsing.

Are you quite confident these freezes and crashes are related to your previous issue? Are you actually copying files from your external HDD(s) at the time?

tmp said:

Copying to externals no longer works, back to where I started, even re-installed the old chipset driver to see if it would calm things down.

It just suddenly went from all-good to all-bad, just like that? Same exact symptoms as before during working with external HDDs?

I wouldn't say it was "just like that". And I'm not sure what the problem is now. I'll be doing typical tasks like browsing or creating a doc and all of a sudden get frozen out, cpu maxes out, etc. I tried using the process hacker but when it freezes, it is random and most of the time I can't even run the app afterwards.

As far as external HDD, they worked a few times and then got worse and worse. I have read that there are several chipset problems reported out there and that is my only guess to the problem. HP says they are releasing updates as they are tested but none available yet for my specific problem.

To troubleshoot, I created a small partition, re-installed Vista and no issues with any freeze ups or HDD copy problems. Either it's a Win 7 problem or a chipset issue. Unless anyone else has a suggestion?

I've got the exact same problem with my Asus M2N-X motherbaord which has an Nvidia nforce 520 chipset. I didn't install any Nvidia supplied drivers (they evidently aren't supporting my chipset anymore) so all the drivers are supplied by Windows 7 with the exception of Realtek HD audio and my ATi Radeon 3450. The PCI USB card option sounds promising, but I don't get the throughput speed I get when using the USB ports integrated into the system board.

There is this speculation that AHCI is whats causing this, so does anyone have any thoughts about that? Would anyone with the problem care to perform a clean install with AHCI disabled and see if the problem is resolved? Also, are people with Intel or AMD chipsets having this problem?