Hard Drive locks up and causes rest of computer to freeze
I am having a "spontaneous" problem with one of my 3 external Maxtor drives.
I am running Windows XP Home (on an internal drive), with 3 external Maxtor drives - a OneTouch 300GB (V):, a OneTouch III Turbo 1500GB (W):, and another OneTouch 300GB (X): - all are powered by AC adapters, and all are connected via their own Firewire (800s I believe), into a PCI card installed inside the tower at the back. (The PCI card corrected a previous problem of my drives not being detected at startup cos of a cheap multi-port hub connection putting all the drives into the same Firewire jack on the tower.)
I originally only had the X drive (in addition to the C drive in the tower), and it worked fine ; once it was turned on it stayed on - the light would stay solid or occasionally slowly flash "up & down", in "half-lit" fashion indicating activity.
Then the drive was getting full so I bought another EXACLTY like it, and that became the V drive. Both drives worked fine, but I noticed the new V drive would "hibernate" after being idle for a while, and the front light would then flash on and off very slowly. When I'd access that drive in this state, it'd take a few seconds for it to "wake up" and then I could get in it. Otherwise, left alone long enough, it would resume itself. This was fine.
Once again, files accumulated and I needed LOTS of space for all my wav audio files, so I got the 1500GB drive, which I called W.
Everything was working great, and this big drive also did the same "hibernation thing" as V was doing. This was fine and everything worked in this manner for a couple of years (or more) now.
Only now, as of earlier today, the W drive is acting up. I guess when it tried to resume itself afyer a hibernation, it got "stuck"? The flashing light on the front was stuck in the "semi-lit" mode (fully lit on one half, dim/unlit on the other half), while "waking up" on its own accord.
I looked in My Computer and it did not show the drive, and of course I could not get into it. (I was actually first alerted to this problem today when I was saving a pic from the internet, and when the window opened for me to browse to a Save location, it started in My Computer and that's when I noticed the W drive was missing.)
I rebooted, hoping that would fix what I hoped was a fluke glitch. But it did it again after the comp was left idle for a couple of hours, only this time I tried to "wake it" from the hibernation mode manually when I went to play a music file locate there via my media player (J River Media Center). This resulted in everything hanging. I eventually got froze up so bad that I could not even open the Start menu to shut down the comp to reboot, and I had to power off manually (cold boot, holding down the power switch on the front of the tower for a few seconds).
Once I rebooted, I tried a System Restore to before this happened (yesterday or the day before). Naturally this came back "incomplete" (which makes me wonder what the point of System Restores even are?).
I then did defrags for all drives incl the OS drive (I normally keep up on these, and none of them looked to be in very bad shape - fragmentation was minimal).
Thus far, it has not had time to hibernate again, so I don't know if the problem is resolved yet.
But since it seems to be happening when the drive tries to resume after a hibernation period, is there ANY way I can disable this hibernation function? I never did understand why my first drive (X) never did this but the other two (one of which, V, is an "X twin") do?
Im summary, if anyone can :
A) Tell me the most likely cause for my drive having trouble waking up from hibernation (and sometimes causing my whole comp to lock up), and how to fix it
B) Tell me how to disable the hibernation mode on the DRIVES (not the computer) so I cna maybe avoid the resuming process entirely.
Thanks.
WTW (Will)
PS - I've seen recommendation for using higher drive letters, but I do not wanna do that - the letters are specific to the drives' content.
I am running Windows XP Home (on an internal drive), with 3 external Maxtor drives - a OneTouch 300GB (V):, a OneTouch III Turbo 1500GB (W):, and another OneTouch 300GB (X): - all are powered by AC adapters, and all are connected via their own Firewire (800s I believe), into a PCI card installed inside the tower at the back. (The PCI card corrected a previous problem of my drives not being detected at startup cos of a cheap multi-port hub connection putting all the drives into the same Firewire jack on the tower.)
I originally only had the X drive (in addition to the C drive in the tower), and it worked fine ; once it was turned on it stayed on - the light would stay solid or occasionally slowly flash "up & down", in "half-lit" fashion indicating activity.
Then the drive was getting full so I bought another EXACLTY like it, and that became the V drive. Both drives worked fine, but I noticed the new V drive would "hibernate" after being idle for a while, and the front light would then flash on and off very slowly. When I'd access that drive in this state, it'd take a few seconds for it to "wake up" and then I could get in it. Otherwise, left alone long enough, it would resume itself. This was fine.
Once again, files accumulated and I needed LOTS of space for all my wav audio files, so I got the 1500GB drive, which I called W.
Everything was working great, and this big drive also did the same "hibernation thing" as V was doing. This was fine and everything worked in this manner for a couple of years (or more) now.
Only now, as of earlier today, the W drive is acting up. I guess when it tried to resume itself afyer a hibernation, it got "stuck"? The flashing light on the front was stuck in the "semi-lit" mode (fully lit on one half, dim/unlit on the other half), while "waking up" on its own accord.
I looked in My Computer and it did not show the drive, and of course I could not get into it. (I was actually first alerted to this problem today when I was saving a pic from the internet, and when the window opened for me to browse to a Save location, it started in My Computer and that's when I noticed the W drive was missing.)
I rebooted, hoping that would fix what I hoped was a fluke glitch. But it did it again after the comp was left idle for a couple of hours, only this time I tried to "wake it" from the hibernation mode manually when I went to play a music file locate there via my media player (J River Media Center). This resulted in everything hanging. I eventually got froze up so bad that I could not even open the Start menu to shut down the comp to reboot, and I had to power off manually (cold boot, holding down the power switch on the front of the tower for a few seconds).
Once I rebooted, I tried a System Restore to before this happened (yesterday or the day before). Naturally this came back "incomplete" (which makes me wonder what the point of System Restores even are?).
I then did defrags for all drives incl the OS drive (I normally keep up on these, and none of them looked to be in very bad shape - fragmentation was minimal).
Thus far, it has not had time to hibernate again, so I don't know if the problem is resolved yet.
But since it seems to be happening when the drive tries to resume after a hibernation period, is there ANY way I can disable this hibernation function? I never did understand why my first drive (X) never did this but the other two (one of which, V, is an "X twin") do?
Im summary, if anyone can :
A) Tell me the most likely cause for my drive having trouble waking up from hibernation (and sometimes causing my whole comp to lock up), and how to fix it
B) Tell me how to disable the hibernation mode on the DRIVES (not the computer) so I cna maybe avoid the resuming process entirely.
Thanks.
WTW (Will)
PS - I've seen recommendation for using higher drive letters, but I do not wanna do that - the letters are specific to the drives' content.
Computers & Internet - Maxtor - Hard Drive