Hard drive temporarily freezes (constantly)

[heh]

Ok i'll try and explain this. Since I upgraded from Win98 to 2k this seems to have been happening. It has progressed to the stage now that while on the desktop, my hard drive can freeze (shows activity on hdd light but isn't really doing anything that can be noticed) for up to 40 seconds at a time, and then go back to normal like nothing ever happened.

This doesn't always happen, but i have a 1.33ghz athlon, with 256 mb ram and it makes music stutter when i open winamp and just say ie! That is pathetic, even my old 166 didn't do that...so yeah its quite an annoying problem.

I have also noticed that the freezing CAN on occassions coincide with say connecting to a server for an internet game. It will freeze instantly then continue normally after 30 seconds.

Not only is it annoying it is slowing everything down to a pathetic and almost unbearable pace at times.

Any suggestions would be welcome, but i'm trying to avoid reformatting the hard disk atm.

 

[Snickle]

What I'd do is identify the brand of the hard drive, go to the maker's website and download their diagnostic. Run it and determine if there is any problem with the drive. If it is still in warranty [can be checked at website] the diagnostic will return an error code [if any] to be given to the technician.

If no problems there, run a thorough scandisk to check for corrupted files.

 

[prajapat]

Only two reason:
1. Most prabably, HDD power down in energy saving feature is enabled and a low value is selected. Check thru control panel.
2. Less probable is that your HDD is developing bad sectors. Solution may be to low level format the HDD.

Best of the luck.