Horrible HDD Performance/Problem.

Seems like this started the other day when I installed the UT3 demo, I noticed it took a very very long time to initilize (bring up the install menu after I double clicked the icon) I could see my cpu use was not very high from my monitor and nor was my ram, but i noticed my hdd light was constantly on, not even flashing and then I noticed when I pulled up my resource monitor the hdd use was 100% and not moving from that postion, files like the system recovery were having alot of use.

I got the game installed tho and it runs fine, lots of other members downloaded the same file with no problems so I dont think it was infected with a virus. My guess was to defragment the drive even tho vista does it on its own. So I got a well trusted defrag program and defragmented.

I put it all behind me because things seemed ok. OS loads up fine, files load up fine, games load fine. However just now I tried to install the demo for call of duty 4 and it did the same thing, super maxed out the hdd, and took a super super super long time to initizlize. I didnt even get the install menu instead I got a pop up error message saying something like too many files open at once being used by a 16bit program, or something of that nature.

I didnt get to take a screen shot because the computer was locked up so bad with the hdd maxed like that I used the task manager to log off.

Something is major wrong here, and I have no idea what it is.

The hdd is performing fine, everything is loading fine just seems to be when I install something? So far I have only tried and had the problem with those 2 demo's.

So anybody know whats going on??

 

I would download and run the diagnostic software for the relevant HDD and run all the tests. Read errors should show up in the HDD SMART data.

You might have a bad patch on the HDD where the UT3 files are located.

John

 

Well so far here is what i have done:

Run a complete virus scan with AVAST with no problems, defraged the hdd, did a few performance tweaks that use the hdd (turned off page fileing, and thinking about giving up system restore, when I looked at the hdd use system restore was using up the most resources)

I have deleted the ut3 and cod4 demo installers wich were both gotten thru my torrent client and am downloading cod4 the traditional way from a server. Infact it just finished now and I am giving it a shot.

From how the hdd was working I dont think it was the hdd, it was definitly OS related, I could have aslo booted into another OS to see if it gave me the same problem since I have a tripple boot system.

 

Well d/led the westerndigital diagnostics tools, the hdd passed the SMART test and a quick diag run.

Later today I may set it up for a detailed diag run to see if it finds anything.

I have the demo installed and running now from the offical download. I guess maybe the torrent file was just messed up. The UT3 file was a torrent download also. All my other files from my torrent client seem fine tho.

Lets just hope there is no more trouble, and on the bright side of things, the issue has made me look into some performance tweaks for my notebook so I will get on that later and speed things up.

 

Don't worry this happened to me during the CoD4 demo install. I think it's the way they compress the file or something because when I bought a game of of D2D it took about 2-3min for the folder to even respond when I opened it. This happened on my old computer w/XP as well as my new one with Vista (G1S so it's not a shoddy performer).

 

Yeah its fine now, the good file took a long time aswell. It was a heavily compressed 1.3gb file or something like that. The file I had before I downloaded it directly from the web must have been corrupted, thats all I can think of.

It was not a long wait, it was like a total system lock up where you could do nothing and it used up all the ram, and started causing alot of page filing. It was crazy. It was not untill the computer said there were too many open files and closed the operation that I was able to do anything.