lock up when hard drive is accessed

[Jack Ryan]

In January I installed a Soyo SY-K7VTA motherboard with AMD 1 GH Athlon CPU and Award BIOS v. 6.0. My system contains three 8 MB hard drives in Dataport removable cartridges, an Iomega Zip CD-Rewriter, a Voodoo4 4500 AGP video card, an ESS 2818 FM-3621 modem card, and the card for my Envisions 4e page scanner. There are two 256 MB SDRAM chips. There is a 3.5-inch and a 5.25-inch floppy drive. The power supply is a Deer DR-300ATX. The operating system is Windows 98 SE.

When I began to notice that the computer would lock up at random times, I assumed that it was "just Windows." However, the lock up seemed to be happening every day — much more often that I had ever noticed before. Eventually I noticed that the lock up tended to occur when one of the hard drives was being accessed -- such as when using xcopy to backup changed files or using Power Quest's "Partition Magic 5.0" to copy my C: drive partition to a backup hard drive. I found that I could cause the lock up by running "crash.bat", a batch file that uses xcopy to copy files from one directory to another and then loops continuously until I manually halt execution. Lock up occurs when I copy from C: to C:, from C: to D:, from D: to D:. Crash.bat will cause the lock up when the computer is cold, or has been off for a half hour or so.

The computer usually has to be rebooted several times if I reboot using the reset button. There is normally no problem if I turn the power off, then back on.

Usually, once I have rebooted from the lock up, the computer will not lock up again as long as the computer is not turned off for more than just a minute or so.

Originally, when I rebooted, Scandisk would run automatically. Some time ago it mysteriously stopped doing this. I now have to run Scandisk manually. Usually, but not always, scandisk.log will report an "error in FSInfoSector" of drives C: (and sometimes of D:, plus lost clusters on D:, assuming I am copying from C: to D:.)

Following are nine things that I have tried that have not solved the problem:

1) I had a local computer store insert a special card and run diagnostics for two days. They could find no problem other than that the computer locked up for them too.

2) I exchanged the motherboard for a new one from Soyo.

3) I used my 256 MB SDRAM chips individually, in swapped positions, and replaced both with other chips.

4) I removed the scanner card and the modem card.

5) I replaced the AGP Voodoo video card with a PCI Matrox card.

6) I replaced the power supply with a unit from another computer.

7) I did a "clean install" of Windows 98 SE on a fourth hard drive (250 MB) which I used as the boot drive. No programs or drivers other than those that Windows insisted on from it's own CD-ROM were installed.

8) I removed all cables and power from the normal three hard drives and CD- rewriter, then installed the "clean install" drive (without Dataport cartridge) in an empty bay and booted from this configuration.

9) With the minimal drive configuration described in 8), I booted from MS-DOS 6.2 on a floppy. The XCOPY from this version of DOS was used by "crash.bat".

None of the above will prevent the computer from locking up.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Jack Ryan

[WJWheels]

You covered every base except cpu and/or related heating up. A common cause of freezes/lockups is overheating. Have you ruled that out? ... or maybe checked it also?

[Jack Ryan]

The lock up can occur within two minutes of booting up. It doesn't seem like overheating is apt to be the cause.

[HAL9000]

Why are you ruling out overheating based on two minutes. Your CPU hits operating temperature within seconds.