f13.net

I need a bit of help here, if anyone can give it.

The other night I uninstalled a number of old games (STALKER, Exteel, DDO) and today my PC lags a good 2 minutes between be clicking on an application and it doing anything other than hang. The hard drive light is on the entire time, but I'm not sure if that's a cause or a symptom.

My antivirus / anti-spyware / firewall (Zonealarm) doesn't come up with anything, the Task Manger shows 99% system idle and I've run Registry Mechanic to see if something was broken - it's all come up clean thus far.

Any suggestions for next steps? I defragmented the drive recently, so perhaps I need to run it again, but that shouldn't account for such a huge lag in doing anything.

Possibly not much help, but I'd start uninstalling those things one at a time to see if I could isolate which fucked my system. Assuming you can get to the control panel if you can defrag.


good luck :(

What are your virtual memory settings set at?

It probably won't solve your problems (I'm no computer expert) but I find that Crap cleaner (http://www.ccleaner.com/) is a really nice utility; I find it makes my PC less sluggish when I run it.

Under System -> Advanced -> ... -> Virtual Memory, I've got a total paging size for all drives of 2046 MB (it also states a max of 4092 MB). The hard drive is only just under 50% full - over 100 GB are free.

Is it fixed size or dynamic (system managed)? If it's dynamic set the initial size to be the same as maximum size, reboot, and listen to see if your hard drive is still thrashing.

If you booted the thing freshly and does lag after it appears to be done loading, and the hard drive LED is constantly on, you might want to move your ear closer to the case and listen for rhythmic (or worse, grinding) noises that might come from your hard drive.

A better / easier way would be to look at the system log. If you see a whole raft of read/write/connection errors, your hard drive is dying.

Having looked at the system log, I've got a few of these:


and quite a few of these warnings in blocks:


Going back as far as I can (i.e. the end of January) some of these same errors appeared, just not with the same frequency I'm getting now.

Sooo... my hard drive is dying? That'd make 2 in 2 years.

EDIT - Okay, next steps. Is there a way to fix it?

If your swapfile and registry are affected by bad sectors, that might be one reason. I had to diagnose a similar problem on some machine, it was acting slow like shit while the drive was busy all day long, too. Turned out there were simply four bad sectors in the journal file, fucking up NTFS to no end. So much for the touted automatic hotfixing features of NTFS.

God I'm so glad I left all that shit behind. ZFS yo!

You mean that system log that didn't bother logging all these controller errors that faulty cable of mine was producing before it fucked up too much of my media files by then? Took a different operating system than Windows to actually tell me.

Get a new drive and minimize usage of this one until you move your stuff over.

It might just be bad sectors like tripledes says; go ahead and run window's default scan repair tool; it's not awesome but it might do the job and at the very least buy you some time and show you what files are now fucked.

Open My Computer, right click on your drive->properties->tools, click on "check now for errors", select both those boxes. It will tell you it can't do this on a mounted volume, and it's scheduled for next reboot. Go ahead and reboot your machine, and it will do the scan before windows loads. It'll take ~1-2 hours depending on your hard drive's size.

Good luck. If this doesn't fix it, then we get ugly.

I've often done that with slowly dying drives and it's always helped for a while - a short while. Never once has doing that permanently repaired anything for me. Drives are cheap enough now that I just replace them as soon as they start to act up.

Get a S.M.A.R.T. hard drive monitoring utility and check it to see how bad things look. You can also use it to check the temperature of your hard drive. Excessive temps is a very good way to shorten the life of your hard drive.

Thanks all, I'll give that a shot.

I'm going to catch hell from the wife (again!) about this. I bought it two years ago, picked the parts and paid the store to put it together (because 1) I've never put a PC together before and 2) with two kids under the age of 3, now is not the time to leave delicate parts anywhere within arm's reach). The system stability has always been pretty touchy. It plays games fine, but there's a chance that trying to open a couple of applications at once is going to result in a permanent hang / crash / BSOD. It's due to a Nvidia driver error that I'm 100% sure is a motherboard issue... but the shop has checked the MOBO (or: said they've checked the MOBO) at least three times when I took it back and can't find anything wrong with it.

When the HD died the first time, the PC that came back worked a lot better, even if there is still the occasional BSOD / reboot.

My wife, who already views the PC as my mistress (and uses it quite a bit too, actually) appears to gain some kind of delight every time the PC goes wrong. Telling her I'll probably have to buy another HD is a gift to her. :awesome_for_real:

Have to give a nod to Spinrite (http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm) if you need to recover data off an inaccessible drive.  Gibson may be a douche, but he wrote at least one good program that has saved my butt a couple of times.

This type of situation crops up at work all the time, Unsub. Our solution, that works most of the time, is to take an image of the failing drive using either Ghost, TrueImage or EzGigII and then copying the image to a new hard drive. Half the time, this fixes the problem with no further repairs needed simply because no serious OS files have been affected. If on the off chance system files have been damaged, you can run what's called a 'repair' installation on your OS using your WinXP disk. I can give you pointers on how to do that if that's what's needed, but for now, unless you want to buy a new HD and reinstall everything from scratch, I'd go to your local Fry's or your internet dealer of choice and pick up a 'end user' copy of Ghost, Acronis True Image or some other imaging software. They retail at about $50, but they can save you a world of a headache if reinstalling everything from scratch means losing ten zillion mp3s, 9 installed game with patches, etc.

Or, if you already have ten zillion mp3s, you may want to hunt in your local torrent sites for "Hiren's Boot CD" which has all that and more. That CD is simply awesome.

Ya well, personally I don't advocate stealing software is all.

Spinrite is a pretentious piece of placebo shit.

PS, I think starting at certain storage space sizes, it might be worth investing in redundancy, if you value your data, indepedently of its nature. My arbitrary cutoff line was 500GB. When I threw my various disks, totalling to 420GB, out as a precaution after they've aged five years, I've installed two 500GB drives in a mirror.

Yes, don't just buy one more.  Buy two more and a raid controller and run RAID 1.  You won't ever lose data again and you'll get a 30-75% performance boost.

These cards (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816116030) are criminally affordable.

Unless your filesystem shits everything up. Rare occasion, but if it happens while owning a redundant setup, you'll be biting your own ass.  :grin:

Uhm, unless I'm gravely mistaken, Raid 1 slows hard drive write down since it has to mirror data across two drives instead of just 1 and I don't believe it'll boost read speed above a single drive since, well, its only reading data from one drive anyway.

Raid 0 or Raid 5 for faster speed. Raid 0 needs two or more drives, but has no data redundancy so it is a bit dangerous (one drive fails your whole OS fails) and Raid 5 requires 3 or more drives.

I'm afraid you are, sir. Unless you're talking about a RAID card which only reads from one drive at a time, which stopped being produced sometime in the late 90s.  Write speed is unimproved, though largely inconsequential on a desktop PC, where the read/write ratio is at least 10:1.  The controller reads in parallel, so read speed is theoretically 2x, though the theoretical is rarely achieved in practice, because of the prevalence of sequential reading and other weird overhead. 

Since the entire topic is around data protection, RAID 0 is useless.  RAID 5 requires a bunch of drives and is slower than RAID 0 on reads and terrible on writes, especially small ones.  If you have a lot of drives, RAID 10 is great.  Otherwise RAID 1. 

Okay, I did this.

The hard drive still goes spinning for a long time before getting around to doing anything. Once the app is loaded, it's fine, but you have to wait quite a while for that to happen.

I'm guessing the next step is to create that mirror of my HD, but that also means getting a new HD, right? I'm fine with doing that, but I just need to know the next steps.

Also: you all lost me at RAID. I know what it means conceptually, but don't understand it at all.

You'll have to explain this to me then. Raid 1 involves mirroring data across two drives. In other words, writing to the array has to, per force, take twice as long as a single disk operating w/o a raid controller. I don't see how reading can be faster than a single SATA IDE drive being read by a regular IDE controller, since, well, isn't the bottleneck just the drive's spin speed, and not anything on the motherboard?

Are you saying that there's some magic that goes on within a PCI-raid controller card that automatically makes a disk read/write speed faster, even when you're only opting for RAID 1 data redundancy?

No it's not. I've used it to recover data off of bad sectors on a failing drive. It wasn't able to get everything and it was really really slow but it did what it said it would do.

Happy to!

The bottleneck in platter drive I/O is moving the head around.  With two drives, you also get two heads and each one moves independently, so it doesn't add to your I/O time.

Essentially, on writes your kernel sends a chunk to write off to the RAID controller, which copies the chunk and sends it to each mirror.  This doesn't take any time.  Then each mirror independently writes the chunk out with its own head.  No added time (I'm intentionally ignoring shit about write caching and buying a BBU here).  On reads, the kernel asks for some stuff, the RAID controller splits the request up into two half-chunks, and each drive head goes off and gets its half-chunk and returns it.  If the read involved moving the drive head around a lot (non-sequential) this will result in substantial savings, since each drive only has to move half as much. 

The magic is in the RAID controller (which can be software, but hardware is better).

So, if I understand you correctly, raid 1 is essentially acting like raid 0, since on the read request, its splitting the data request between two drives, just like it does in raid 0?

Sort of. Despite what sidereal is saying I've seen plenty of benchmarks where RAID 1 is no faster or even slower than a single drive setup. So it depends a lot on your controller, even current ones. RAID 0 by contrast is specifically designed to do the parallel reads (where in RAID 1 it's essentially an optional feature) so any controller that supports RAID 0 will show a speed up when using RAID 0, at least on certain operations. In other words, if you do want to try RAID 1 I wouldn't go in expecting it to give you better performance. If it does that's just a bonus.

Edit: "when using added RAID 0" part

That's sorta what I thought. What's the name of the feature on the controller that specifies increased speed performance under Raid1?

It's usually referred to as "split reads" but I don't know how the marketing people talk about that feature.

Did the Windows scan find any errors?

I'd be curious to see what happens when you try to start programs in Safe Mode. When you boot the system, tap on the F8 key, select Safe Mode when the menu pops up, and see what happens when you try to start IE, notepad, and other programs.

If it's crapping out even in Safe Mode then yeah, making a mirror of your drive would probably be a good next step. (If things seem to load normally in Safe Mode you should do troubleshooting with the MSConfig utility (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310560)). You could try backing it up to DVDs if there is not too great a quantitiy of data, and then reinstall it to your present hard disk (I'd do it out of curiousity), but your drive probably will need to be replaced, so you likely would want to just mirror it to the new hard disk. I'm not up speed on mirroring software but I've heard good things about Norton Ghost, this is the cheapest price I could find the most recent version (http://www.amazon.com/Symantec-13561463-Norton-Ghost-14-0/dp/B0012YKRSI/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=software&qid=1205230013&sr=8-2).

Whether RAID1 is faster or not than a single drive depends on the IO scheduler used. If you're going for cheap cards or cheap software RAID solutions, don't expect any scheduling. ZFS gets me like 80% speed improvement on sequential reads (which again gets trashed by the fact that COW-filesystems are by nature fragmented like shit). Using the WD Raid Editions in my system, I get like avg. 40MB/s from the single disk pool while I get like 74MB/s from the mirror. That's for sequential reads. Random IO is also improved a lot, no benchmarks here, but simply double the possible IOPS because there are two drives serving the same data.

--edit: Well, it appears if I supply the ZFS record size as blocksize to dd, it pushes the single disk to 67MB/s and the mirror to 120-125MB/s, so I guess there's more into it if your reads are decently sized (though ZFS prefetch with linear and stride read detection should help compensating for small reads), though the ratio is still around 80%.

IO scheduler.

My favorite part is where everyone started to just ignore UnSub to wallow in RAID benchmarks :drill:

UnSub, you might want to check your cabling on a lark.  It's unlikely, but I have had a drive problem that looked exactly like a dying drive that magically fixed itself when I replaced my IDE cable.  You'll need a spare cable, which you could temporarily steal from your CD drive just to see if it works.  Or you could just try reseating the existing cable.

If that doesn't work, it's likely your drive is dying and in the interests of preserving it you should minimize usage of it.  Like cut down on the pr0n downloading until you can get a replacement drive and image it over.  Even after the copyover, it sounds like you've got some kind of registry issue, which. . uh. . I dunno.  Windows registry arcana.  I'd wipe it and install Gentoo, but that's just me.  Windows probably has some kind of recovery thingamabob that might not bluescreen.

Its called a 'Windows Repair Install'. Once you've gotten your new hard drive, and you've figured out how to make a mirror copy of the drive to this new drive, boot it up. If you're still getting errors, you can attempt the repair.

Its a bit tricky only because like most MS documentation, its counter intuitive to get to. You want to put in the WinXP install disk and make as if you're going to reinstall from scratch. Go through the install cd boot up, then right after hitting f8 'installation agreement' page, you'll notice that windows looks for any previously installed OS. It should find it, at which point you'll get the option to repair that installation. What this does is strip all the OS drivers and reinstall them, thereby repairing any damaged system files by replacement. It will look, on the screen, as if its installing things from scratch, but if you pay attention, you'll notice that the first action is to delete a bunch of stuff, which is normal. After that's concluded, you should be able to log into your maching as before, and find your programs and files intact. There's a chance that the repair process will remove drivers for video/sound and you'll have to reinstall those device drivers, but its less work than doing everything again.

If that doesn't fix your ills, then its unfortunately time for a fresh reinstall.

As an update - the PC's gone back to the shop. The HD is less than 12 months old so I figure they can fix it for me. There are errors on the hard drive, I couldn't get it to boot into safe mode (it wasn't an available option) and it was getting increasingly difficult to even load up the desktop.

However, once I move on from this system, I'm never going back to this shop. I shouldn't be bringing this system in at least once a year for repairs.

Care to give an explanation of why you say this? I was considering getting a copy, but if it really is useless, then I'll save my money. Does it not work better than other tools? Is there another tool that you would recommend instead? I'm honestly interested to know. Thanks.

Sums it up (don't be confused at the site title, it's a sidetracked discussion):
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.dcom.xdsl/msg/9aeee32323c2978e?dmode=source&hl=en

tl;dr: It only appears to have an effect on your MFM/RLL disks in your old ass IBM PC/AT that haven't caught operating temperature yet.

It's back from the shop. They could find nothing wrong with it.

On one hand: idiots.

On the other hand: they'd switched off all of the already small list of start-up programs I use. When I reactivated ZoneAlarm Security Suite - and only ZoneAlarm - things slowed down again. It looks like ZA wants to update the antivirus, but can't do so for some reason. Hmmm, I'll have to play with that.

Figures it might be Zone Alarm.  I don't know why everybody loves it.

I like an all-in-one solution and it is reasonably well reviewed across the industry (that I saw, anyway). Given that they bought in a well-regarded AV program, it seemed like a good idea. Plus I've used ZA for about 4 years with no real issues until now.

Still investigating.

Hmm, I wonder why you couldn't get it to boot into safe mode (you tried tapping on the F8 key right? tap like once a second)... that would have helped clear it up without taking it in, the next step would have been troubleshooting with MSConfig as mentioned... So whats next? Are you gonna uninstall Zone Alarm and see what happens?

Meant to update this:

Playing around, on start-up I've had only my Logitech mouse drivers load up and the PC still performs poorly. So Zonealarm looks to be in the clear.

Safe mode works correctly, but when I move on to safe mode with networking, the performance drops.

I haven't yet tried to run things with the modem / router disconnected / reinstalled, but has anyone heard of a modem / router causing these kind of problems? I'll look up the model and such things at home later if it helps.

Its rare, but a failing nic card/modem/random periferal, or corrupt drivers running them can make a system hang as the system makes calls to the failing device and has to wait for a response that might not be forthcoming. Yank out the nic card or modem and see if that clears up the problem.

That seems to have done it. I switched network ports and suddenly performance has seen a huge improvement.

Okay, in conclusion:

It was ZoneAlarm. The short of it is that ZA was fighting against it's own updates, treating them as though they were hostile actions of hackers. Which then broke other things. WinXP would load up fine if the network link to the internet was down, but the second I plugged it back in before booting the computer up, performance went back into the toilet.

Turning ZA 'off' didn't work because it still leaves things running behind the scenes. It required a few options switched off, an uninstall, a bit of a system clean-up and then a reinstall but, after a test or two, things look like they are working as they should.

Check your warranty on the drive do. Seagate used to, and may still have a 3 or 5 year replacement plan.  Then again.. you gotta send them the drive which opens a whole can of worms if you have nudes of the wife on the drive.

See why I hate Zone Alarm?  Even when you turn it off it still screws over your system.

ZoneAlarm does corrupt itself with age. I've never seen anything quite as bad what UnSub describes but I've seen it stop accepting its own updates and refuse to be uninstalled before.  When ZoneAlarm starts acting up like that I normally take it as a signal that it's time for a routine system disk format and reinstall that I do every couple of years anyway.