Frequent unresponsiveness, 100% hardware disk usage, 0% software usage

I had this same problem some time ago. It was on a new SSD install though.

The issue turned out to be a problem with the disk drivers "NCQ" (Native Command Queing).

I had to go to the hardware manager and to the SATA port for the drive itself and on the advanced options I turned off NCQ and it never happened again.

Only some drivers expose that option though, but it's worth taking a look...

SpringHalo said:

Do you know which service it was that was causing the problem?

Edit: My problem isn't solved yet. When I said it seems to have fixed it, I meant that the problem didn't occur in diagnostic mode, from what I could tell.

I have Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service disabled. Unfortunately I don't keep a log of every system change. I know I turned that service off. The rest of the tweaks I believe are in the WMP settings themselves.

Also if I remember correctly when you set up the network with the radio buttons for the various settings, it wants to have WMP share media. After making the settings I wanted, I went back into the configuration on several occasions to make sure my settings "stuck." For example if you log out, then log back on, or reboot, take a look at the config to make sure it didn't go back to what it wants.

No, it really shouldn't. It should also note that it's committing memory to the dump file with a counter at the bottom, so it would seem that perhaps it wasn't deciding to dump at all if you didn't see a count up to 100...

There was no counter, just something saying 'preparing memory for dump' and 'preparing HDD for being dumpee' or something of that nature.

Edit: it said collecting data for crash dump
initializing disk for crash dump

With no progress bar or counter underneath.

Hrm - sounds like the hard drive hardware has gone out from underneath. Once Windows gets to a blue screen, it has very little information left running, but it does have a very minimal driver for hard disk access to dump all data to pagefile.sys, and then reboot to rename it memory.dmp in the \Windows directory (by default). If the drive running the OS has gone south at that point and is no longer physically available, though, it won't have enough logic available at that point to do anything but wait with what you see there. This could still be a driver issue (as part of it is still used at that point), but it could also be a hardware issue with the underlying disk subsystem or the disk itself. If it works in diagnostics mode, though, it would seem more a driver issue than a hardware one. If you don't see any issues in the event log regarding your disks, then while it is still worth checking the SMART status of the drives to be sure, I'd put money on this being a disk controller driver issue.

How would I go about checking this SMART activity? I'm currently running an error scan on the hard drive itself, but I'm not sure how to check the driver

EDIT: Downloading updated motherboard drivers, just to check.