Hard drive light goes solid red and computer locks up...

cwright111 said:

Maxseven - as for the locking up thing i mean it completley locks..mouse doesent move.. CTRL ALT DEL does nothing..only thing i can do is hit the power button untill it shuts off. iv tried leaving it but the computer was still the same after half an hour :/

I'm with the others then--you've had hdd problems before also. Get a new one, they're cheap nowadays.

seekermeister said:

Once, when I had a hard drive fail, I checked it with the defragger, and found an abnormally large area showing up as fragmented, and running a defrag didn't change it as expected.

That was probably the pagefile.

No, I said that it was the hard drive, because it was the hard drive.

seekermeister said:

No, I said that it was the hard drive, because it was the hard drive.

The pagefile is called pagefile.sys and is located at the root level of your system harddrive i.e. C:\. You can only see it if you have "Hide protected operating system files" unchecked. Mine is 8GB in size.

You may also have a very large hiberfil.sys there as well--mine is >6GB--this might be another file defraggers won't touch; you probably have to disable Hibernation before defraggers will work on it.

But I don't think you can "disable" pagefile.sys, defrag it, and "enable" it again. The act of disabling it deletes it iirc.

I really don't see the point in having to explain, but in the instance that I spoke of, it wasn't just a few GBs that was fragmented, it was the entire drive. I don't know what caused it, but I suspect that the logic board went bad, and was spraying writes all over the drive. In any case, the only solution was to replace the drive.

karlsnooks said:

Seekermeister,

This old-timer with much hardware and software experience understood perfectly. We are a little past the point of needing an education on pagefile.sys and the hibernate file.

You speaking to me, or maxseven?

seekermeister said:

Once, when I had a hard drive fail, I checked it with the defragger, and found an abnormally large area showing up as fragmented, and running a defrag didn't change it as expected. This would be just another quick check to throw in with the others.

All I said in response to this, was that this "large area" that wouldn't defragment was probably the pagefile!

If sm was saying that it was not a "large area" but rather the whole drive that wouldn't defrag, well I took "large area" to mean "not the whole drive, but a large portion of the drive".

Right guys im back and my computer is now fixed! :)

It turned out to be my newer hard drive that was causing the system to lock up..after removing it iv not had one lock up for that past 5 days or so that its not been in.

Not to impressed with its failure after 9 months though..western digital shall most definitely be getting a call about this.

Thanks very much for all your help guys
Hope i can do the same back one day!

Daniel.

Sorry to hear about the hard drive failure, but thanks for the update, and I hope you can get the drive replaced without too much trouble.