HL2 froze, now my system takes forever to start up

[Hajime]

You might also consider running a program like Spinrite or some such to check whether your hd is going potentially bad.

The problems discussed are signs of a dying hd.

 

[archcommus]

Slow bootup is a sign of a dying HDD?

How do some of you get yours down to four passes of the bar or less? What do you tweak to get it so fast?

And can anyone answer the question of what made this happen when HL2 froze Friday night in the first place?

 

[Hajime]

archcommus: It's not only the slow bootup, but it is everything else you have described.

As for HL2, I've had a client's comp freeze and crash on me in the middle of a spyware scan and removal. I had gone about assuming that the OS was full of spyware - extremely slow, etc. etc. etc. - and it ended up being a dying hd that died when I put some amount of strain on it .

 

[archcommus]

Interesting. The reason I thought it was something else, though, is because I haven't experienced any other issues with other games lately, such as Diablo II, Pandora Tomorrow, or Doom 3. Is Spinrite a free, simple program? I might give it a whirl just to make sure.

 

[Hajime]

Spinrite's a somewhat expensive, more advanced diagnostic tool then most Manu's free diagnostic tools.

I'm not really familiar with what programs that are free that are out there for checking hdds - I'd recommend finding out your hd's manufacturer, and grabbing a copy of their diagnostic tools to find out.

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: LSANTHRAX
What exactly does the prefetch folder do? and how do you clear it out?

It preloads dlls and some apps during the splash screen portion of boot. It's a good thing but sometimes the list of what to prefetch gets a bit obsolete and it's good to start new. To clear it out just delete the contents of the folder, not the folder itself.

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: archcommus87
What's the difference between /F and /R?

I'll try that when I get home.

/F takes the drive offline so errors can be fixed. /R does a full surface scan and automatically implies /F as well. Both will ask you to reboot. FYI, never run chkdsk without an /f or /r switch. With a drive online it will often give false positives and negatives about errors.

 

[archcommus]

Well, I formatted Monday. Since then my boot times are better but still far from perfect. Still stays at the DMI screen for about four seconds, and takes about 20 passes of the bar on the XP loading screen. Once in Windows, though, everything is fine EXCEPT for my HDD transfer speeds. When transferring from one partition to another on my 120 GB Seagate, it only copies at about 500-600 KB/sec. So even after a format, we have slow boot times and slow HDD transfers, but everything else seems okay. What would this lead you to believe?

 

[Hajime]

Run manu diagnostics ASAP. Sounds characteristic of a dying hd to me.

 

[archcommus]

I tried only one stick of memory, system booted up lightning fast. And the bad one is the one I tried putting it with the notches wrong a few times before I realized it was backwards, that was like five months ago. Maybe that scratched the contacts?

So does that mean Corsair won't honor the lifetime warranty for me?