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Hi,

I had this problem start a few months ago with a zip file that could not be extracted or moved, doing so would result in windows freezing up… but it was an odd freeze. I can move the mouse, move icons, get responses when mousing over the taskbar but attempting to open anything or close existing windows results in no response from anything, the mouse however can still me moved around. It never full locks or re-boots.

The offending file was deleted and the problem stopped.

A short time later, the problem returned and defragging became the main issue, I have a few files (main offender being a file in 3D mark 06) that when attempted to defrag freezes up as per the above, a major problem with Diskeeper on auto, it was like a time bomb. I excluded folders that caused issues and it stopped… for the time being.

It's now back bigger and better than ever. I'm not even defragging and I get days where I restart the computer many times because it freezes, as per above, minutes after logging into windows, the all of a sudden it stops and all is good, for some reason I can't leave it on over night running torrents however, rarely is ever survives the night. I ditched Diskeeper and downloaded PerfectDisk, same problem, for the record windows defrag doesn't work either and it appear to only affect the windows installation drive.

I've looked around and came across I program called Spinrite that may help on the assumption the are errors on certain parts of the drive that are affecting whatever happens to be on that part (I'm not technical when it comes to this kinda thing, my apologies for that terrible description) and though I don’t fully understand it, I'm willing to give it a go.

Damn… I wrote a novel.

Anyway, hoping I'm not the only one out there that has experienced this… It runs fine when gaming but leaving it on overnight and defragging causes issues.

You are lucky.
When my computer froze mid-defrag, All my drives got corrupt and I lost everything

Run the Error Check before the defrag. It can make a big difference. Recommended order when doing maintenance is Disc Cleanup> Error Check> Defrag.

I would say your HDD is almost certainly going to fail any minute. I truly hope you are ready for it (backups), and would like to say spinrite cannot cure what is broken, but can quite easily break something already failing. Bacause it puts extreme read/write tests on the drive.

I always advise having two drives in a PC, and using the second as backup media, plus drive image software and a quick auto-backup package (recommend syncback - even the free version is superb at the job, although not the easiest to get to grips with)

Well, it actually happened.

Crashed again during defrag and corrupted a windows file, hence, could not even boot into windows, deceided it was time to start fresh.

Thankfully, as you have said, I run 3 drives. All my storage and backups are on a seperate drives, all my games and windows installation on another with 2 partitions, the one that went boom, so didn't lose much more than the time involved to format and reinstall.

The drive is rather new, year at most. I had no problems with the second partition my games are on, never, just the windows partition, so hopefully something just went bad and a new install will fix it, currently so far so good, running smoother than ever.

I hope that a format would fix most issues and your not saying the drive has more extensive problems... cause that would suck...

Vas.

Format did not fix it... still have the issue.

New problem, can't even backup. I have a program to backup the whole drive and it freezes as per the above a few % in, crap...

So I can't backup, defrag or error check plus other small random things that cause it as well.

I'm going to assume there is something wrong with the drive, how it failed in 6 months is beyond me but anyway. I'll pickup a new one and copy the data accross (assuming it doesn't crash doing that as well) and see what happens, at least if that fails I've ruled out a drive issue... though beyond that who knows...

Unless of couse someone has a better idea?

Vas.