Windows 7: Random hard drive lock-ups

Hi,



I have very annoying problem with 7 #7000/#7100 (not present in XP or Vista) - on random intervals, a couple of times per day the hard drive just blocks with it's LED constantly on. Windows still responds, except for operations involving the hard drive (like opening Explorer) - every program that reads from HDD just becomes "Not responding". Exactly after 2 minutes, everything is back to normal.

Drivers are installed, there are no unknown devices in Device manager.
The laptop is http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/product?product=1844615&lc=en&cc=nz&dlc=en〈=en&cc=nz - Centrino Duo, 1 GB RAM, 80 GB SATA HDD.

Any ideas?

same problem

look in resource monitor to see what program is accessing the drive and what files its reading/writing.

probably its a good idea to just leave resource monitor open so you can switch to it quickly when you get this problem.

I had the exact same problem with RC on my laptop and it drove me nuts but i did solve it.

Read a post on another forum and it has to do with the power settings you have it on. Change them to something else. I have since changed laptops and dont have the problem on the new one but basically whatever it is on now is bad and one of the others is good. I think putting it on the normal performance mode is what fixes it but honestly i cannot remember all i know is i changed it and no more freezing.

I wish i could find the post again (took me weeks to figure it out in the first place) to link to but changing the power settings is what did it for me

thanks i will try changing

Initially, my videos were freezing after a few minutes of playing. I thought its a codec/graphic card issue. But then I noticed that Windows Explorer and torrent uploads would also freeze. Tried playing video from an External USB Drive and it works fine.

Therefore, I think I am facing the same problem of hard disk locking up.
Any fixes yet? Much appreciated.

Asus G1S A1 with T7500 @ 2.2 GHz, 2GB RAM, 160 GB Hitachi SATA HDD.

I have the same problem on
XP
Vista
Windows 7
It seems better at first system install time but....

it has nothing to do with the hardware since I've got it on brand new machines as well as older machines
it behaves as a sleep mode of the disk though I consistently switched that off where possible .... I mostly heve it with fast sata drives.. but there it is most annoying of coarse



How do I switch on the resource monitor ??? where can I get it or do you mean the tesk manager (of no use for the problem)
I know the CPu itself is idle , plenty of memory to waste , complete
idle disk (but I notice it mosly on directory access (10 to 20 files per directory)



Solving this problem, and it would be fun working on computers again


thanks

On resource monitor only "System" is running before everything stop responding and the HDD Led remains on for 2 mins before the system recovers.

I tried changing to different Power Plans but this doesn't solve the problem...

hi and welcome

How abt you tell us abt your compuer

Ken

Processor: Intel(R) Pentium(R) D CPU 2.80GHz
RAM: 2GB DDR2
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate RC 32bit
HDD: Maxtor 7L250S0 ATA: 250GB

The hard drive is partitioned with partion magic (C:/ - 100GB and H:/ - 150GB)
Windows 7 run on H:\ and Windows XP run on C:\