Nightmare Harddrive issues

[Demon Cleaner]

I still have a lot Maxtor drives (although only 1 SATA), also the Diamond Max versions, but never had problems. I remember reading an article about it having problems with the nForce4 boards.

Shame is that you lost a lot of time until you found out the problem, that is why I avoid a new XP install. That are also things that make me go really crazy and go berserk.

[Submeg]

Shame is that you lost a lot of time until you found out the problem, that is why I avoid a new XP install. That are also things that make me go really crazy and go berserk.

Really? You dont like reinstalling windows?

[Harrison]

I would much prefer a completely clean install of any OS, instead of using a mirror of an old install. This is especially true of Windows as the registry can quickly become clogged up with a lot of old data and corrupt keys that can slow down the OS and cause problems. And there is also always a lot of junk left behind in the main Windows and Program File directories over time.

[Demon Cleaner]

I use Registry Mechanic which does a pretty good work on removing obsolete files and much more, plus I tend to clean my registry manually. And as I don't reboot my PC very often (once a month), I don't care if it boots in 10 seconds or in 1 minute.

When my system is still stable and I removed, cleaned, installed something, I just do an incremental backup of the previous one, works fine for me.

[Harrison]

Fair enough.

I think I prefer clean installs because of the software I tend to use that can easily be effected by registry keys and old files left over from older versions of the same software. Plus I tend to only do clean installs once Windows starts to exhibit strange behaviour that cannot be tracked down to specific reasons and easily repaired. For example on my old install of XP the system would sometimes pause for a long time (minutes) after selecting to delete a file, before it actually popped up the box asking if you really want to delete the file. Not sure of the cause of that one.

If I can fix a problem with an OS I will do that rather than wiping it and doing a clean install. It is a last resort for me only if something cannot be easily fixed, or if I'm changing the HD. I think it is better to track down a fix an error so you know what caused it than to just wipe the OS with a clean install and still not know the cause of the original problem.

[Harrison]

OK, some further things regarding the setup of this system I had to reinstall.

I noticed that when cold booting the system Windows was pausing at the XP logo and the activity bar stopped for a few seconds. The HD light on the case was not showing any activity either. Then the progress bar would resume and everything would continue. When performing a warm reboot the system didn't do this and the system loaded without the pause.

On looking through the system event logs I noticed an error being logged when a cold boot was taking place:

Event ID: 51 - Disk - An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk0\D during a paging operation.

The odd thing with this error is that D is my DVD writer, not one of the HDs, and this writer is the only device still on the IDE ports, with all HDs on the system being SATA. Maybe the BIOS or Windows uses a different drive ID for event errors.

I did some digging around and discovered a lot of forum posts about this error, and it being related to SATA drives. And many people were reporting two possible ways to fix it. And the issue is related to SATA drives that use NCQ (native command queuing) as Windows seems to have a problem with this.

The first solution was to uninstall the motherboard's own SATA controller drivers and just use the standard Windows ones. The problem with doing this is that you lose access to some of the settings for the controller.

The second was to go into the Device Manager and then into the SATA controller properties, and untick "Enable command queuing" for the SATA drives.

I did this second solution for my SATA drives and it worked. No more errors appearing in the event log and the system now boots from cold without the long pause.

So if you are using SATA harddrives in your PC and are experiencing a long pause at the XP logo when booting from cold I recommend you try disabling the command queuing for your HDs in the SATA controller properties and see if that fixes the problem.

[Harrison]

And another odd problem I was having. In the event log I was also getting another series of 6 errors when the system booted. These consisted of the following two messages:

Error 32 - SideBySide - Dependent Assembly Microsoft.VC80.MFCLOC could not be found and Last Error was The referenced assembly is not installed on your system.

Error 59 - SideBySide - Resolve Partial Assembly failed for Microsoft.VC80.MFCLOC. Reference error message: The referenced assembly is not installed on your system.

I did some searching for this and found the solution in the Microsoft Knowledgebase. I'm not sure why but the system needed the Visual C++ 2005 runtime libraries installed. Once I downloaded the latest redistribution package for this and installed it these errors vanished.

Anyone got any ideas why I would need these? Or what is loading as the system boots that needs them?