DVD drive gets bezerk and XP freezes repediately

[DaFrawg 0]

Yes, I have downloaded and installed the most recent drivers for everything in my system, yes, I have Googled on this, yes, I have cleaned my motherboard, yes, I have done several virus and spyware checks.

 

It occurs sometimes (not all the time, just sometimes) though that my system freezes for no actual reason. It was always right after asking for what drives the PC has - I had it twice opening explorer (no, not Internet Explorer, just the "My Computer" thing), once when I tried to add a file to Winamp's playlist and once when I tried to save a document from Word.

 

The symptoms are always the same:

- My IDE LED (motherboard connector) flashes, the LED of the secondary IDE master (DVD player from Toshiba) is also flashing, but the other drives work fine (I can still "use" the secondary slave).

- Processor load is most of the time 0%.

- Every minute the system completely freezes, but after ten seconds it runs again, but one minute later it happens again, and again, and again. At that moment the processor load is 100%.

- The process that visibly crashed during the operation (not redrawn, but the client area is erased though) can't be terminated using Task Manager.

- Only thing that helps is a reboot.

- After rebooting there is a new entry in my CurrentVersion/Run thingy, something like "dumprep 0 -r" (I'm not sure of that -r).

 

I'm running on Windows XP Professional SP2, Windows Update all done (except for Media Player 10, but who needs that...). My motherboard is an ASUS A7V8X-X, my proc is an AMD Athlon XP 2800+ (333 MHz FSB, 2.08 GHz clock), I have two memory slots occupied by Kingston RAM (both 128 MB on 266 MHz). My video card is an ASUS FX5700LE 128MB (on AGP) and I also have a Wireless NIC (Realtek 8180 chipset).

 

My pagefile is about 512 MB at minimum.

 

I have the following IDE drives installed:

Primary IDE Master: Maxtor 40 GB HDD (WinXP, GRUB, Fedora Core 2 are located on that drive on different partitions)

Primary IDE Slave: Maxtor 120 GB HDD (just some Media on NTFS)

Secondary IDE Master: Toshiba DVD-ROM player

Secondary IDE Slave: Lite-on CD-RW burner

 

I have once resized my WinXPProf partition with Partition Magic 9 or 10, after I defragmentated the partition twice using the standard XP tool (and I defragged it afterwards a couple of times)(to make some space for Fedora).

 

That's about it, except for the remark that I really need a solution to this. It's stressing me out.

[adamvjackson 0]

Does this only happen when a disc is present in the DVD drive?

 

Do you have any issues using the drive in FC2?

 

In Device Manager, go to "View" and enable "Show hidden devices".

 

I suspect that there is something running in the background that is periodically polling the DVD drive; This could include some copy protection hidden devices (such as StarForce), so that's why I suggested checking Device Manager.

 

A possible alternative is that the DVD drive is failing... But it sounds like you have most of the obvious stuff checked already.

 

You might want to try using SysInternal's Process Explorer (it's freeware) to see what is running when the problem occurs. It's similar in nature to Task Manager, but more comprehensive.

 

Good luck, and post back.

[DaFrawg 0]

Originally posted by adamvjackson:

Quote:

Does this only happen when a disc is present in the DVD drive? Do you have any issues using the drive in FC2?

Sorry, I have not tried it yet.

 

Quote:

In Device Manager, go to "View" and enable "Show hidden devices".

Well, the CD I used to have in that drive is the Halo CD, which is protected with SafeDisk. But there are no hidden devices under the "DVD-/CD-ROM-players" node.

 

Quote:

A possible alternative is that the DVD drive is failing...

That's quite possible, since the Windows Kernel is really busy with the DVD at those times (like I said, TaskMan doesn't show any CPU load at that time, except for every time a freeze has stoppped, but I don't know what process did that) and it sometimes just forgets to leave some system resources for the other applications.

 

Quote:

You might want to try using SysInternal's Process Explorer (it's freeware) to see what is running when the problem occurs. It's similar in nature to Task Manager, but more comprehensive.

I'll try it, thanks for the hint.

 

I've also tried to disable the drive (it now has a nice red cross over it in the Device Manager), and I have had no problems since I've done that.

 

(to be continued)

[DaFrawg 0]

Originally posted by DaFrawg:

Quote:

(to be continued)

Well, well... I had a similar 'crash' yesterday, but it was totally different this time.

 

I reinstalled my DVD player and left it empty. Worked fine.

I used my DVD player to rip some CDs, to play some audio from it, and it worked fine.

I put the Halo CD back in, no problems.

 

But suddenly... my system freezes every two seconds for a very short period (less than 0.5 s). I check my IDE, but it is not really doing something. I check my processes using that SysInternals tool and notice that the Interrupt handlers are using 30% of my CPU. I check my Wireless network card status and I notice that it's sending packets like a madman. So I disable it. Still, 30% CPU load. I enable and uninstall my onboard LAN (not connected). Ah, 0% CPU load. I reenable my Wireless LAN NIC and I have a normal WLAN connection again.

 

I would swear that I have disabled NetBIOS, which has been fucking up my media playback until last week. Because I disabled it by then. I don't know if it was NetBIOS though, since I didn't fire Ethereal up when it during that freeze-unfreeze period. I should do that next time.

 

This might seem a bit irrelevant, but I think this does have to do something with the other system freezes. The NIC I'm using by the way is a Sweex LC700010 (Realtek 8180 chipset). I do have the latest drivers by the way.

[DaFrawg 0]

Well, I got sick of those freezes, so I reinstalled Windows. I hope it was just a temporary flaw.

[technoplume 0]

I had a similar problem whit my computer. I bought a bran new SONY dvd player. The system keep frezzing after I inserted a cd or dvd in it. So I tried to find the problem, I even tought the firmware for the via shipset was at fault, well after searching for to year, my pride took me to long, the warranty go expired, technology got cheaper. So I bought a pionear dvd-108 2 mounth ago and the system never freze any more. I also changed the ide cable because I used to get them out often. and one day they broke.

 

So mabe you have a bad wire somewere. or the dvd is just not compatible whit some hardware you have. Well I feel better now that it's out.

 

lol

 

Well Good luck.

[arkonmx 0]

DVD-Rom drives are known to have various flaws. Plus, SP2 is known to have problems with hardware devices. Like, if you upgrade to SP2 without installing SP1, your USB drives on the tower ain't gonna work properly. Stupid stuff like that makes SP2 worth wondering about before installing it on top of your original WinXP.

Anyway, DVD-Rom like the reply before mines, just get a new one, and you probably ain't gonna worry about the garbage of freezing operating systems.