I’ve just upgraded my main computer from XP Professional to Win 7 Professional 64-bit, and I’ve noticed a strange problem that I never had before, and that I haven’t had on at least one other machine that I’ve updated to Win 7 Pro 64.
For years I’ve stored data for all programs on the D: disk, separate from the OS and programs on the C: drive. This greatly simplifies backing up.
However for several programs, doing this causes them to go into “not responding” mode for about one minute (I’ve timed it) practically whenever I take any action: click on a button, whatever. For instance, in Firefox, when I download a file with the download location set to a folder on the D drive, I get the rotating blue timer icon for one minute, then the download starts. If I change the download folder to the C: drive, it works normally.
This happens on several programs, including MS Outlook 2003. However, many other programs do it with no problems, including other MS Office programs.
The good news is that the simple workaround is to move the files to C, but the bad news is that I really would like them all on D.
Does anyone have any ideas about what’s happening here and how I can fix it?
is it possible the other drive(s) are spinning down due to unuse, and Explorer is sitting there playing with itself waiting for the drive to spin back up? I’ve never seen that long of a delay, but who knows. I’ve only seen that kind of delay when using a domain-attached PC on a very slow network.
do you have any programs which have installed an Explorer shell extension? among these are programs that modify the right-click menus in explorer; compression programs like Winzip are an example.
oh, one thing you might try is check Event Viewer, in the System logs, and see if Windows has recorded any errors regarding writes to that specific drive. I’ve seen failing hard drives cause stuff like this.
jz78817: Thanks for the ideas. The only Explorer shell extension I could find was the NVIDIA control panel. I uninstalled it (and all the NVIDIA drivers) but no joy.
I didn’t see anything in the event logs, but I’m not sure what I’m looking for, or exactly where to look. Any suggestions?
aceplace57: I have another machine set up the same way with no problems. It’s a mystery, and a very annoying one, since this is my main work machine, and not only is it slowing me down, it’s taking up a lot of time that I don’t have to waste right now. I may end up going back to XP if I can’t solve this problem. That would be a real pain in the butt, because I like Win 7.
r click on the drive in “my computer” and look through the properties to see if there are any settings for caching or read ahead optimization that are disabled.
Does the same thing happen writing to a USB memory stick/flash drive?
If you popped the second drive from the other Pc in does it do the same thing?
Try swapping data and or the power connectors to the drive?
Try different sata port on the motherboard?
Download drivesitter and run the trial to see if you have a slow progressive failure going on.
My guess would be that the drive is corrupted. Have you ever run a scan disk on the D: drive? Rt. click the drive letter in windows explorer (or whatever file manager you like to use), select “properties”. In the new window that opens, select “tools” and then “check now” under the first entry “error-checking”. It will ask if you want to force a dismount. Say yes. If it seems to not respond then it has scheduled the check for when you reboot, but hopefully, you will a message saying this.
If the scan comes back clean, then I don’t know. If not, recheck the drive every couple of days or so. Unless you have frequent crashes, it should not accumulate any new errors in such a short amount of time. If it does, then there is some thing wrong with the drive.
If there are errors, you will probably see new entries in the root directory for the drive called found.000, found.001 or something similar.
something else to keep in mind. If there are errors, you might want to select the ‘search for and mark bad sectors’ option in the window that comes up when you select ‘check now’. If there are bad sectors, this will also cause repeated errors unless you tell the OS to mark them as bad and ignore them. Depending on the size of the drive, this can take several hours. On a 2 terabyte drive, figure it will take over night - at the very least.
I think I’ve solved the problem. There’s an old internal modem that I used for dialing numbers from my address book and for the rare fax I had to send or receive. I hadn’t noticed at first that Win 7 didn’t recognize the device, and after trying and failing to locate appropriate drivers for it, I simply disabled it. That seems to have fixed the problem, knock wood.
I’ve ordered a new modem that is supported by Win 7, for all of $15, including shipping, and should have it in a couple of days.
I guess it’s possible that a funky driver would interfere with the operation of one of your hard drives, but I’ve never seen anything like that personally and really can’t imagine how it would happen.
modems used to run on a serial port address with a dedicated IRQ (interrupt request line). But since we’ve moved to flexible IRQ handling, that shouldn’t be a problem. Also there shouldn’t be any connection between an IRQ used for a drive and a modem - whether IDE or SATA.
I hope that really did fix your problem, but it seems very strange. I would still run the disk scan.
The reason I don’t think it was a disk failing is that I had the same problem when I used either of the other two hard disks, and it seems highly unlikely to me that both disks would start showing the same failure mode simultaneously. And, as I said before, the timeouts were almost always exactly one minute. I would expect a failing drive to have more random delays.
Also, the problem only showed up after I installed Win 7. There was no indication of any delays before that.
But a disk scan can’t hurt. I’ll try it a little later.
Win 7 had identified the modem as a PCI Simple Communication device, or some such, so my WAG is that it might have thought it was a network card and tried to communicate with it every time a call was made to another drive.
In any case, if the problem really is gone, I don’t much care what was happening.
If it comes back, I’ll be sure to be back here looking for more help.