Advise for freezing system?

[BobMCT]

Have 2010-ish HP Slimline desktop with dual core 3.5Ghz CPU, 8GB RAM, 640GB HDD and Win 7 SP1. Runs 24x7 reliably. Replaced PSU last year. Within the past few days it has started freezing up. First by showing spinning icon when trying to start program but mouse pointer still moved. Then mouse froze, then entire system locks up and HDD light is on solid. Took apart and totally cleaned out with air so there is no debris inside, checked heatsink and fan on CPU which all looks good, ran diags on ram and hdd both good and monitored CPU temp which shows normal. This happens 5 minutes in to reboot. Only option is to power button until turns off.

Normally this should have uncovered cause but I'm stumped. Looking for ideas/suggestions as to what might be the cause?

Ideas please?

Thanks

 

[xwb]

Does it only happen on reboot also when booted from cold (i.e. shutdown completely and then start)

 

[BobMCT]

Yep.

 

[apstef]

Last time I had system freezes, it was because my OS hdd was going bad. What diags did you run on your HDD?

Use a utility (CrystalDiskInfo, HDtune, HD Sentinel are some of them) that reads S.M.A.R.T. data and look for any reports on bad/reallocated sectors.

 

[BobMCT]

Thanks - hdd is a WD Caviar Blue and among the others I ran WD's own Caviar diagnostic utilities. Other than a few relocated sectors all reported fine. Thanks for the thought.

 

[rclarke250]

Does this happen if you boot into diagnostics, or a live linux disk?

 

[BobMCT]

Been running Knoppix from a CD. Running the Smartctl util to run diagnostics. Says drive has been up over 4 years, has one bad sector and is otherwise in good shape. Funny that some of the minor errors show as cause "old age" (no kidding). But booting from Knoppix the system has been running a couple hours now with no lockup.
I will retry booting from Windoze and see if the lockup occurs again. The next item might be a "System Repair" from Windows. And soon I want to apply the Win 10 upgrade anyway.

Thanks for the suggestions.

 

[goombawaho]

Go to the downloads page for your model and get the HP Vision Diagnostics CD image. Burn to a CD. Boot from the CD. Run the diagnostics (short first, longer second - can't remember all the options) and see what it shows.

This one may work for all HPs but check on your particular model page to be sure there is nothing SPECIFIC.
Link


"Living tomorrow is everyone's sorrow.
Modern man's daydreams have turned into nightmares.

 

[Beingdinu]

Try to boot the system to safe mode with networking and then see if the system freezes, try to use the internet. and if possible . make the start up changes from MSconfig page .

~Dinu