Performance :: HDD Spinning Down / Clicking Every 30 Seconds
Aug 10, 2015
My second HDD (Samsung HD155UI, 1,5 TB) is, as of today, clicking every 30 seconds, as in briefly parking the head or something. I've been using that drive for over 3 years without one single problem, and only recently (i.e. less than a week ago) did I upgrade to Windows 10 - while at the same time swapping out some parts for good measure - CPU, Motherboard, GPU and RAM. Of course I did the whole clean install shebang, and in the beginning everything ran absolutely smoothly. Installed all of my apps and drivers, moved all of my data back, and no problems whatsoever. Yes, Windows is activated.
Now today I'm playing - ironically - Clicker Heroes on Steam. I usually leave it idling in the background while I'm doing other stuff on the PC, however I've started to notice this regular clicking sound. At first I thought it was my external hard drive - turned that off, no dice. Eavesdropped into my PC and quickly found out it was the secondary HDD, as my main SSD couldn't possibly be the source of the noise. Panic ensued, immediately ran a backup in case the drive went south. During the backup, no clicking whatsoever. After it was done, the clicking resumed.
Chkdsk'd the quick way, and once with /r - during the checks, the drive's quiet as a ninja, but once those completed without errors, click. Click. Click.
CrystalDiskInfo also shows my Drive in good health, and I have the latest firmware for it too. Event viewer showed no irregularities (apart from one single "ID 157 - Disk 2 has been surprise removed"), so I thought it must be some idle setting or power management thing. Checked power options a thousand times, "turn off hard disk after" setting was initially at 20, I set it to 0, then 60, then 120. Nothing changed whatsoever.
BIOS power management settings are all turned off as far as I am concerned. Pretty sure I combed everything through, unless there's some hidden setting.
Now, cue the Resource monitor. It clearly shows some activity spikes (blue curve) every time the drive clicks, which happens exactly every 30 seconds. However, I cannot for the life of me identify what it is that is causing these spikes.
At some point I suspected something with the Chipset or something, maybe RST was messing with my HDD. But uninstalling it (as well as disabling RST in BIOS) yielded no substantial improvement.
So now what's left for me to do is:
- Boot into Safe mode, see if issue prevails there
- Plug the SATA cable of the HDD into a different port, see if that changes anything
- Try a different hard drive (that I don't have right now so meh)
- reinstall Windows 10 (last resort, I'd rather avoid this)
Any way of making it so that when I press the Power Button on my Windows 10 desktop that the computer will power down without me having to click with the mouse to turn off various programs or clicking the "restart anyway" button that appears. I managed to do this with windows XP in the past. I think it might have been a registry alteration?
Previously if I double clicked the shortcuts of Steam, Origin and Uplay while they were running instantly maximized their windows. Now if I double click them it takes a long time before they are maximized as if the computer is reloading them from scratch. I also have GOG Galaxy as a shortcut but it does not happen with that icon. What do you think changed?
The only thing that IO think might be related is that I disabled indexing of C drive but I later found that it was not a good idea and changed it back to indexing enabled.
I have this issue where windows seems to hang/get stuck every 5 to 10 seconds for about 2 seconds, like right now while I am typing. I type the words and about three words types out and then hangs for 2 seconds and the rest I typed while stuck gets lost and I have to backspace and restart again.... Same happens with mouse clicks, sometimes when I click it does not register (I presume it is right in that 2 sec delay sweet spot) but the mouse cursor movement is smooth and does not get stuck.
SO I checked my Task Manager and found that RAM,CPU and Network are all low in the 10% - 20%, but my HDD Runs at like 80% -100% all the time. See Screenshots of Task Manager and Resource monitor. The disk keeps getting used full load every 5 to 10 sec.
I have tried disabling Disk Defragment service in the Task Scheduler and several other tips I found on the net but no luck.
Is there a tweak that would allow the Windows 10 Task Manager performance view (the graphics sliding every second) to show more than 60 seconds ? Windows 7 would allow me to see near 30 mins !
So my pc was working fine I have Windows 10 pro then I was having issues with the xbox app and party connectivity so I looked it up found that if I uninstalled the teredo tunneling and reinstalled it, it was a possible fix so I did it and then windows would not load after that I see the initial blue windows sign on start then when it would normally take me to sign in it just has the spinning dots and I waited but after about an hour I just gave up and restarted a few times and tried numerous things it can launch fine in safe mode...
I have win 10 x64 on a Dell XPS 8700. It had Win 8.1. Been on Win 10 since release. Today my son went to reboot the computer and at boot, just got spinning dots. He turned it off, same thing. Got to a diagnostic and it said it could not repair. So I decided to use Acronis 2016 to restore the weekly image from Sunday. Acronis said restore was successful, but same thing, Just spinning dots under the dell logo.
I have win 10 x64 on a Dell XPS 8700. It had Win 8.1. Been on Win 10 since release. Today my son went to reboot the computer and at boot, just got spinning dots. He turned it off, same thing. Got to a diagnostic and it said it could not repair. So I decided to use Acronis 2016 to restore the weekly image from Sunday. Acronis said restore was successful, but same thing, Just spinning dots under the dell logo.
So I recently upgraded to windows 10, the Installion performed successfully, I selected my account and chose the express settings, after this I was presented a green screen with a series of dots spinning, I let this run for well over two hours in which nothing had changed, after waiting I did a hard shutdown.
When loading up it gave me a blue screen where I had some options to choose my os, where I selected windows 10, the screen then went black with the windows logo, then the green screen returned, I then went to bed and upon waking up it was still stuck on that green screen.
I tried clicking, escape, when pressing Ctrl alt del I was presented a navy blue screen with a few options, network status, ease of access and shutdown options. I've done multiple restarts, on the blue screen where you select os i have tried safe mode and now I am attempting to restore previous build.
I started my computer and came back to find it at a error screen with the smiley face saying that information needs to be collected then I can restart. It displayed and error code and mentioned something about a driver error. I waited until it reached 100%, but it didn't restart on its own so i shut the computer down manually by holding the power button on my case. Then it booted up, but it got stuck on the spinning circle of dots.
I have been able to press Esc, CTRL+ALT+DEL and F2 while at the spinning circle which bring me to the login screen but without the box to enter my pin, however, I am able to access the network, ease of access and power options. I have tried restarting, shutting down, and holding shift while restarting in an effort to boot with safe mode but none have gotten me farther than the spinning circle.
My issue is pretty straight forward: last night I left my computer powered on, and when I woke up, I had a Windows update screen stuck at 100%.
The mouse didn't work, everything was frozen.
I restarted my PC and it froze at the spinning dots loading screen. Before that, I had a screen saying "preparing your desktop", or something like that.
I already had this problem, and solved it by leaving my computer powered on the whole night
I started my computer and came back to find a BSOD. It displayed an error code and mentioned something about a driver error. I waited until the loading reached 100%, but it didn't restart on its own so i shut the computer down manually by holding the power button on my case. Then it booted up, but it got stuck on the spinning circle of dots. I have been able to press CTRL+ALT+DEL while at the spinning circle which bring me to the login screen but without the box to enter my pin, however, I am able to access the network, ease of access and power options. I have tried restarting, shutting down, and holding shift while restarting in an effort to boot with safe mode but none have gotten me farther than the spinning circle. Attached are photos of the different screens
I have a custom built dual boot Win 7 64 bit OS. I got notified about upgrade availability and upgraded successfully with a minor glitch. (The monitor display went off with frequency mismatch. While I was searching the machine restarted automatically and voilla win 10 was up). It did few more restarts and I configured Kaspersky also to work. Overall it was working fine and restarts after enabling Kaspersky was successful.
However for the first time, I did shut down and system never came up. Its stuck in a grey screen of spinning wheel (GSOD? Grey Screen of Death).
Unfortunately I didnt create a recovery disk and now I can't do any action.
What I have tried
a. CTRL+ALT+DEL button works only once.. It shows 3 icons, wifi connectivity (connected to my network), accessibility option and restart option.
I have tried Shift + Restart - but no luck in bringing Safe mode..
So the only option for me is to either shut/ sleep or restart. I have tried all 3 - but always comes back to GSOD
b. Starting in Go Safe mode - I have read "tutorial" on Win 10 Go Safe mode.. None of the different options work for me as I can't see any display. I have tried using Shift + Restart but no difference.
c. I found other option is to have recovery disk. Unfortunately I didn't create one. I have seen the tutorial on "recovery drive".
What can I do?
a. Should i download win 10 ISO and try to boot? b. Can I create a recovery disk from Win 10 preview PC ( 64 bit - from a friends pc)
I tried getting windows 10 and when it decided to reboot and update it goes through the Nokia logo and to gears where it spins for a short while then turns itself off. I have tried using the different reset methods multiple times but to no avail. I don't even get the exclamation mark. I have a Mac Book Pro and tried the beta NSU for retail but it wont even recognise my device. Phone was working fine until update... Is there a solution, other than getting a new phone?
If I press the shut down button my laptop goes to the "Shutting down" screen then the display turns black, but it doesn't shut down. My connected mouse's lights turn off but I still hear the CPU working, the fans spinning and the laptop light that shows that it's turned on is still on. This problem started happening since 2 days ago.
I returned home from work today to find that my computer won't boot. Great, it's going to one of those weeks... After the bios screen and the windows 10 logo, the computer hangs on the following screen, blue background with the spinning white dots. It looks like it's trying to log in, but it gets stuck. The dots never freeze, or at least not in the hour or two I've left it- it just keeps spinning and trying to log in. Before I go further, I'll give you some specs:
Homebuilt Windows 10 desktop, up to date (upgraded from 7 months ago) Gigabyte z87x ud3h mobo Haswell i5-4670k Nvidia 780ti 8gb ram
Ok, where was I. The strange part about this is that everything was working fine yesterday, and I didn't really do anything since then. I upgraded from W 7 to 10 months ago and it's been working fine. There were no windows updates yesterday (Feb 22nd), and I didn't install any other driver or system updates. In fact the only things I did install were the Steam VR test and a game on steam. Nothing else was changed since the last time it booted properly.
Now, onto what I've tried. I'm at a bit of an impasse here because I can't really get the computer to do anything. Booting into bios works, but that's about it. I can't get into safe mode (W10, F8 doesn't work, can't restart into it from desktop, or from login screen).. I've messed around with cables inside the tower, plugged and unplugged hard drives. In the course of restarting many times, I got a "bios corrupt" error, after which it started recovering into the secondary bios (losing all my OC settings and other bios settings). But the problem persisted.
I then tried updating my bios, but I keep getting "invalid file" messages when I try to update from bios/Qflash. Finally, I didn't have a W10 recovery drive, but I downloaded one from Microsoft. Startup repair says it cannot find any issues, and attempting a system restore gives me the error "you must specify which windows installation to restore. Restart, select OS, then select system restore." that doesn't seem useful. Ok, on to command prompt. Trying to enter safe mode from here gives me a "boot config data could not be opened. System device not found."
I have a clean (other than a few new programs) windows 10 install on my pretty powerful desktop. Just today for some irrational reason, when I boot up my PC, and select the OS I want, I'm met with a great screen with the spinning dot animation. So j left it. I left it for a while. It took nearly 2 hours to get to the lock screen. I thought it was running a disk check or installing updates or somthing annoying so I ignored it. Fast forward to this evening. I had a BSOD from what I think was a bad OC. Booted up PC and was met with the same grey background with white spinning dots. I'm able to press ctl+alt+del and get the options for power/restart/sleep and ease of access/accessibility in the bottom right corner, but no amount of restarts seems to get past this. So I'm sitting here waiting for it to muscle through to the lock screen like it did this afternoon...
P. S. Windows 10 installer USB drive startup repair said it couldn't do anything.
I have a freshly upgraded laptop (8.1 > 10) which worked fine until now. When I try to shut down the PC, it just hangs at the blue shutting down screen and the circle keeps on spinning.
I have to hard power off the laptop by holding down the off button, but that isn't going to do the laptop any good.
What can I do to fix this? Is there anywhere that will tell me what happens when shutting down?
I returned home from work today to find that my computer won't boot. Great, it's going to one of those weeks... After the bios screen and the windows 10 logo, the computer hangs on the following screen, blue background with the spinning white dots. It looks like it's trying to log in, but it gets stuck. The dots never freeze, or at least not in the hour or two I've left it- it just keeps spinning and trying to log in. Before I go further, I'll give you some specs:
Homebuilt Windows 10 desktop, up to date (upgraded from w7 months ago) Gigabyte z87x ud3h mobo Haswell i5-4670k Nvidia 780ti 8gb ram
Ok, where was I. The strange part about this is that everything was working fine yesterday, and I didn't really do anything since then. I upgraded from W 7 to 10 months ago and it's been working fine. There were no windows updates yesterday (Feb 22nd), and I didn't install any other driver or system updates. In fact the only things I did install were the Steam VR test and a game on steam. There's nothing else I can think of that has changed since it was last working.
Now, onto what I've tried. I'm at a bit of an impasse here because I can't really get the computer to do anything. Booting into bios works, but that's about it. I can't get into safe mode (Due to W10, F8 doesn't work, can't restart into it from desktop, or from login screen). I've messed around with cables inside the tower, plugged and unplugged hard drives. In the course of restarting many times, I got a "bios corrupt" error, after which it started recovering into the secondary bios (losing all my OC settings and other bios settings). But the problem persisted. I then tried updating my bios, but I keep getting "invalid file" messages when I try to update from bios/Qflash. I also don't not have a W10 recovery stick (which I suppose I should have had around? I can't just download this somewhere huh?).
Have desktop HP Pavilion P 6000 4GB DDR3 1 Terabyte memory. Had no problem with Win 7, but frequently get the blue spinning circle next to my pointer. Some times it continues to surf other times it give a temp freeze. Checked CPU percentage not high but disk will jump to 100 on startup. The computer light and sound is chomping away when I am just reading the news. Ads in the middle of the page on both sides of any game I play along four or five TV commercials during a 15 minute online Hearts. Reset to factory settings. Hardware problem or Win 10 too busy data mining. I google an issue and 10 minutes later check my email getting solicitations on the same issue.?? Edge was very fast when first downloaded. Oh yes download speed is 35 but runs closer to 40.
Have a Pavalion P6000 series $GB DDR3 ram and a Terabyte hard drive. Page hang up. Check and all drivers indicate updated and the ram is running about 49% with Edge browser open. Using Webroot Security Suite I did an Analyze function and got bac k "Active process has a possible memory leak (Edge.exe)" When I googled this it was a problem asked several times when people changed from Win7 to 8.1.
