Windows freezes for a few seconds?

Question

RAID

Actually, sometimes when you open "My Computer" with a list of disks or when you insert a flash drive / DVD, the computer just freezes tightly (the mouse does not move, the keyboard does not respond to NumLock), i.e. complete lack of response to external stimuli. After 10-30 seconds, the computer itself dies, as if nothing had happened. The question is actually how to determine the cause of such a system freeze and how to deal with it.
OS: Windows 7 x64
It is worth mentioning that the system is on RAID and all the screws known to it are included in it. Previously, the picture was: RAID 1 (2x250 gig) on ​​the system drive and RAID 0 (2x640 gig) on ​​additional storage. Now all this has migrated to a single RAID 5 (4x640 gig). In both configurations, the symptoms were the same. There is a suspicion that one of the disks (previously included in RAID 0, and then in RAID 5) is buggy, since earlier freezes happened more often when accessing additional storage. But neither SMART nor any other quick tests show problems with any of the drives. Iron raid on the Intel chipset built into the mother (ICH10R), the behavior does not change from the firewood version.

Answer 1

Tightly and at the same time on a multiprocessor machine. If this is somehow related to the disk, then most likely some kind of driver blocks all cores in the ISR or DPC. But it could also be something related to spinlocks (which is more likely, because I observed something similar with the proactive protection of the outpost a couple of years ago - I took it to hell as soon as I figured it out).
Actually, you should start looking for a reptile with the installation of the WPT Kit
. Since the problem appears infrequently, you will have to constantly turn circular logging. Run from elevated console:
xperf -on latency -stackwalk profile -maxfile 128 -filemode circular
Naturally, some of the resources will be eaten off for permanent logging, but according to personal observations, it does not really interfere even on a relatively weak low-middle end laptop more than two years ago.
After the problem is reproduced, you need to run from the eleve console:
xperf -d trace.etl
Then we do
xperf trace.etl
to open the log and you can start analyzing. The first step is to find the problem area and zoom in on it. After that, write
SRV*c:\downstore*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols in symbols
and output "Summary table" to "Stack counts by type". With a very high probability it will be possible to detect oddities already there.
It's also worth taking a look at the "Summary table" for "DPC CPU Usage" and "Interrupt CPU Usage". Generally speaking, the semi-official requirement for the duration of ISR is no more than 10 µs, DPC is no more than 25 µs. The average durations of ISR and DPC should be close to these, the peak value may be in the region of milliseconds or even tens of milliseconds. If there are hundreds or thousands, this is already a problem.
All in all, happy hunting.

Answer 2

Perhaps in the settings you have turned off the hard drives after a certain idle time?

Answer 3

maybe a virus ... or it's in the antivirus itself or the firewall. It happened to me when I made a mistake in setting up the antivirus ... I went over it, well, when I downloaded the file from the Internet, the system froze.

Answer 4

I had this with a buggy AHCI driver for Windows 7. Try changing it to the standard AHCI in Device Manager.

Answer 5

Could it be related to some attempt to open the floppy (download drivers) in its absence? Let's say it is enabled in the BIOS, drive A is there, but the floppy drive itself is not physically there. The computer may freeze when you try to access it.
If not, try opening the task manager and try to see in it, does any of the processes start to consume all 100% of the resources for a moment? Well, dig from there.

Answer 6

hm. I had such nonsense on HP dv7 (Win 7 x64) and then it went away. there is no raid, one screw.
but now there are occasional delays when opening QuickLaunch (the computer responds to peripherals, the percentage is not loaded, but shortcut icons in QuickLaunche are not drawn for up to 10 seconds and Explorer does not react to anything) + the external USB keyboard falls off periodically, also for 10 seconds.

Answer 7

I have a similar situation on my i5. Only the mouse moves, and everything freezes for 4-5 seconds. Sometimes this coincides with the propeller stopping (although it should not be stopped in the settings), but very often right during active work. Everything is fine under openSUSE.

Answer 8

I had something similar on my laptop (Vista, 32 bit) (but I don’t remember how strong the freezes are). and they were related to parking heads with annoying clatter (known as marble drop) that comes from the propeller APM. after changing it, the clatter along with the friezes disappeared. to change, I use quietHDD, set to autoload with administrator rights through the task scheduler. although there are many ways to change the APM.
maybe that's the issue?

Answer 9

observed periodically. agree with Tird that it is screw related, at least in my case.
(me) daily defrag helps ( www.mydefrag.com/ ).

Answer 10

In my case, the problem is in the HDD from Western Digital habrahabr.ru/blogs/sysadm/106273/

Answer 11

I had a similar problem (although not on such equipment), which turned out to be a hard drive thermal calibration problem - for some reason, the disk controller decided that the screw was too hot, cut it out and restarted after a while. It was cured by replacing the problem disk under warranty.
In another case, the disk began to be covered with bad sectors - but SMART showed this business as if it were in good spirits. Therefore, this is not your case.

Answer 12

The problem is the same, but the trick is that I have an SSD and there simply cannot be problems with defragmentation ...