Windows broken or hardware issues?

[TheCrazyCryptonian]

Hey all, this might be a long one,

 

Specs:

• Windows 10 Home 64 bit
• Asrock H270M-ITX/ac  (BIOS version 2.5, latest, 2017)
• Intel i7 7700 (2017)
• 2x8GB Crucial Ballistix Sport (2017)
• Gigabyte Windforce 780ti (2014)

Drives:

• 850 EVO m.2 250gb (boot, 2017)
• Seagate 1tb (2014)
• Seagate 2tb (2018)
• Kingston 120gb SSD (old boot drive, 2014)

 

My PC has been having a number of issues for a couple months now and it seems as though the problem is beginning to worsen. At first, the issue was that every so often on start-up I would be unable to access file explorer. The file explorer window would open, however nothing would appear and the window would become unresponsive. Then, the whole of windows explorer would become unresponsive for a short period and restart itself. I could still launch certain applications such as chrome and discord but any program that attempted to access other files would crash, sometimes to the point where task manager would be unable to close the program after it became unresponsive. After dealing with this issue for a while I decided to reinstall a clean copy of windows hoping this would fix the issue. (Also just to note there were a few issues with installing windows updates before this point sadly remember the error code it gave).

 

With a fresh install of windows I went about reinstalling all my programs, however the issue returned. Luckily I found a workaround as I realised if I just left my pc for 10-15 minutes I would be able to access my files again normally, however there were still some odd issues with this. When trying to create a new folder or file, file explorer would not automatically update, and I would have to exit and re-enter the containing folder for any changes to be applied. Also after certain usage for example, copying the contents of an 8gb USB to my desktop, file explorer fails to load anything again for a couple minutes.  This issue was present across all my drives.

One problem that has only popped up recently is that Steam has been unable to install new games. With the fresh windows install there was no real issue getting this to work, however simply pressing the install button completely crashes Steam. If I try the process of restarting steam and installing a couple times, Steam will crash so hard its unable to close through task manager, and it even causes the whole file explorer issue I have on start-up to happen again.

 

Managed to get a screenshot of the file explorer crashing:

 

I've been through the following steps so far:

 

• The ole' classic reconnecting everything.

 

• Thinking it may have been a drive issue I checked CrystalDiskInfo however all drives seem to be healthy (worst was 97% on my boot NVMe ssd). Also used windows checkdisk on all drives but no issues. sfc /scannow as well

 

• Checked for a RAM issue with memtest however no errors were detected overnight.

 

• When checking event manager there used to be a consistent kernel error occuring (again, cannot remember what error code was). My event manager now is a mess of warnings and errors however I'm not sure how normal this is? Most of the errors seem to be driver failures but really don't know what I'm looking at.

 

So I'm basically stuck not knowing what to test next to be honest. I wish I had some spare parts lying around because I'd like to try swap out the motherboard. I don't think its a drive issue as the problem are present on all drives, and I'm not sure if its a windows issue because of the clean install. I realise I do have some older hardware but those parts don't seem to be causing any issues. I could start taking drives out one by one and seeing what happens but I'm not sure the drive issue explains steams failure to install a game (on any drive btw).

 

I've probably missed lots out here but any help is greatly appreciated before I pay for someone to take a look at it.

 

[manikyath]

check crystaldiskinfo for your mechanical drives, and look at "read error rate", "write error rate", and "seek error rate" parameters.

 

if one of those is extremely high (let's say 5 digits) then the drive has severe mechanical issues, and is probably causing the hangs. crystaldiskinfo doesnt take these into account when assesing a drive's health, so even when this is going on to the extremes, it'll still report as healthy. (i have a few drives that have rates up in the millions, and still say they're OK, while they clearly arent)

[Mark Kaine]

Sounds indeed like hard-drive. 

 

Failing hard drives can cause strange issues, also on other hard drives in the same system. 

 

Also as much people like crystal disk,  it can be unreliable or at least difficult to read... i had 2 malfunctioning hard drives and crystal disk said "good" and i didn't see any abnormal errors or such either. 

 

Lastly there are no critical errors in your event log, so it doesn't look like something "serious" per say.  (Could still be hard drive of course)

[TheCrazyCryptonian]

1 minute ago, Mark Kaine said:

Sounds indeed like hard-drive. 

 

Failing hard drives can cause strange issues, also on other hard drives in the same system. 

 

Also as much people like crystal disk,  it can be unreliable or at least difficult to read... i had 2 malfunctioning hard drives and crystal disk said "good" and i didn't see any abnormal errors or such either. 

 

Lastly there are no critical errors in your event log, so it doesn't look like something "serious" per say.  (Could still be hard drive of course)

 

4 minutes ago, manikyath said:

check crystaldiskinfo for your mechanical drives, and look at "read error rate", "write error rate", and "seek error rate" parameters.

 

if one of those is extremely high (let's say 5 digits) then the drive has severe mechanical issues, and is probably causing the hangs. crystaldiskinfo doesnt take these into account when assesing a drive's health, so even when this is going on to the extremes, it'll still report as healthy. (i have a few drives that have rates up in the millions, and still say they're OK, while they clearly arent)

 

 

Both my mechanical drives seem to be giving pretty low error rates:

 

 

I do know how weird they can be, especially with the 1TB being 7 years old now. Will try removing it and seeing if anything changes. The 2TB drive is pretty recent though and hasnt seen any real heavy use. 

[manikyath]

10 minutes ago, TheCrazyCryptonian said:

 

 

 

Both my mechanical drives seem to be giving pretty low error rates:

 

 

I do know how weird they can be, especially with the 1TB being 7 years old now. Will try removing it and seeing if anything changes. The 2TB drive is pretty recent though and hasnt seen any real heavy use. 

they're not enormous.. but defenately worrying to say the least. seeing that the command timeout is big too probably implies that windows is just sitting idle waiting for these things to respond.

[Tan3l6]

Always a good idea would be - sfc /scannow

Though seems hardware issue.

[TheCrazyCryptonian]

Just now, Tan3l6 said:

Always a good idea would be - sfc /scannow

Though seems hardware issue.

Ah yeah I've given that one a go already, forgot to mention it though thanks  

[TheCrazyCryptonian]

33 minutes ago, manikyath said:

they're not enormous.. but defenately worrying to say the least. seeing that the command timeout is big too probably implies that windows is just sitting idle waiting for these things to respond.

Removed the old drive and the issue is still there. Is there a chance it could be one of the SSDs? Think I might try removing the drives one by one and seeing how that goes. Also included the crystaldisk results for those:

 

Boot:

Old Boot:

 

Update:

 

Alright I've removed every drive down to the boot drive and the problem still persists. Interesting note though, I managed to open file explorer fine as soon as my pc started, but the issue began after 30 seconds or so as if a certain application had started and caused the issue. I kept my eye on resource/task manager though and couldnt really pinpoint any particular program starting at or just before that time.

 

Edited March 26, 2021 by TheCrazyCryptonian

[ndesign.ie]

Boot drive maybe overheating in situ.

Virus or bad data block.

Service in background like AV scanner, update downloader.

When cold boot with Taskmanager and cpuid hardware monitor see what service is running and what on the board is heating up.

Reinstall OS, if continues - > new boot drive