Please help me solve one year old problem! On my knees :-)

[Jamesxxx]

Edit- Case solved! Thanks.

My 3d workstation (non internet use, 3d work only) runs XP64 on Tyan K8WE (Bios 1.04) MOBO, 8GB RAM. Has 4 beautifully working internal HDs connected to it. PSU is 1KW and rock solid.

Issue1-
My one and only major problem is that 60 out of 100 times when I press "windows + e" to open "My computer" or if I touch the "tool bar" everything freezes for 40 seconds or so before the window pops up or the tool bar/start menu becomes active and usable. It's as if Windows explorer gets busy doing something before it wakes up.
While working inside my software or once the "My computer" window pops up everything woks 100% well. The machine on the whole is rock solid and goes days rendering and never ever crashes.

I have a feeling this above issue might be connected to this issue-

Issue 2-
On another older Internet only PC I had a Maxtor HD that was partitioned into two parts I and J. This HD crashed my other system once so I took it out and replaced it with a new HD. Now this Maxtor HD I put in an external HD enclosure to see if the HD really was bad or not. Then I connected the USB cage to my workstation and saw the two partitons. I copied the important data that I needed. Then I went into my workstation's disk management and quick formatted it and converted it into one primary partion. The I used the "safely remove USB mass storage device" to unplug it, to never use again.

So what is my problem? Well "My computer" still showed the two older partitions "Removable disk I" and "Removable disk J". Even though the disk was ejected and not even connected to the workstation any more.

I went into device manager and uninstalled the two drives. Restarted and they were back Both under device manager>disk drives and inside " My computer". Then under disk drives I right clicked and disabled them. Red cross appear on them. So they disappeared from "My computer" but were still under disk drives marked with a red cross. I just wanted them gone forever.

So I went ahead and reformatted and reinstalled XP64 on my workstation to try to solve this problem. Guess what? The two "Removable disk I" and "Removable disk J" showed up again Where the hell is this information being held that keeps making these 1 year old disconnected USB external HD pop back up even after reinstalling the OS?

You think issue 1 and issue 2 are connected? Please help me solve this. Pulling my hair for last one year and have almost gone bald LOL

 

[mpilchfamily]

The best thing i can recomend is performing a repair install of windows. This should work out any small problems or hickups the system is having.

Just pop in your XP disk and restart the system. The disk will prompt you to either reistall or repair. Hit reinstall and it will find you have a windows instalation already. It will then prompt you to either do a fresh install, loosing all the old data, or to conduct a repair install. Now you choose the repair and it will go threw and fix any problems with the OS it can find without effecting your otehr data.

 

[Jamesxxx]

Maybe you did not read all the way down but I did a clean reinstall of the OS after reformating the hard drive. If I don't find a solution this time then I will think about moving to Vista XP64. It's bugging me though that I could not solve the problem.

Thanks for your reply.

 

[kh4130]

Hmm.. sounds weird. When you reinstalled XP x64 did you do a quick format? If you feel like doing a OS reload maybe try running DBAN to completely nuke/wipe the drive before reloading the OS.

 

[Jamesxxx]

Originally posted by: kh4130
Hmm.. sounds weird. When you reinstalled XP x64 did you do a quick format? .

Yes I did.

If you feel like doing a OS reload maybe try running DBAN to completely nuke/wipe the drive before reloading the OS

I will be moving to Vista Xp64 in the near future so will install it on a clean new drive just to be safe. I guess some things are never meant to be solved

 

[sao123]

it seems like something modified your MBR.
do an MBR reset.

 

[RebateMonger]

Check your "Network Places", mapped drives, and Printers to ensure that you don't have any non-existant drives, printers, or network locations on the list. I'd probably just delete everything and re-make any shortcuts that you need.

Non-existant stuff can cause freezes.

 

[Denithor]

Originally posted by: RebateMonger
Non-existant stuff can cause freezes.

:laugh:

That's almost good enough for a sig quote!

 

[Jamesxxx]

Originally posted by: sao123
it seems like something modified your MBR.
do an MBR reset.

How do I do a MBR reset? Would that involve re installing the OS as well? Or does reinstalling the OS and reformatting the drive automatically reset the MBR?

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: Denithor

Originally posted by: RebateMonger
Non-existant stuff can cause freezes.

That's almost good enough for a sig quote!

Maybe...but I spelled it wrong. Non-existent.

 

[Denithor]

I know, that's part of what makes it charming.



And to the OP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record

Though it is possible to directly manipulate the bytes in the MBR sector using various Disk Editors, there are tools to write fixed sets of functioning code to the MBR . Since MS-DOS 5.0, the DOS-mode program FDISK has included the (undocumented, but widely used) switch /mbr, which will rewrite the MBR code. Under Windows 2000 or later, the Recovery Console can be used to write new MBR code to a hard disk using its fixmbr command.

Boot from your Windows install disk, go into Recovery Console, do two things. First, run chkdsk /r to make sure you don't have any disk errors. Second, run fixmbr to repair any problems with the MBR.

 

[Jamesxxx]

Ok so I formatted by drive and installed Vista but the two drives returned LOL.
Anyway then I started again.....flashed my Bios to the latest one, used that DBAN to Nuke the HD. Reinstall Vista after doing another quick format and and everything is perfect