I've just done a format/reinstall of windows Vista because things were getting slow and my files were so disorganised. Ocassionally, I'd do something (or not) and the spinning orb would appear for a while, the system became unresponsive (though I could move the cursor around) and I'd sit waiting patiently.. and then after about 10 seconds there'd be a whirl of hard-drive activity and the system would be responsive again. This problem seemed to get progressively worse until I decided it was time to format.

Anyway I just formatted, and rather than fixing the problem, it's far worse. Every 30s-1min or so, the system just locks up with the blue spinning orb cursor. Sometimes I have to wait a full minute or more for it to become responsive again, and other times it doesn't at all, and I have to force a restart. It is so frustrating!

As far as I know, my hardware is sound. I've done memory diagnostic tests, the power supply is brand new... Sometimes when I start in Safe Mode, the problem happens once or twice but then it's okay. I'm typing this now under Safe Mode and it seems alright... I've also tried resetting the BIOS settings to default, etc... no avail.

What do you think? Does this sound like a hardware issue or a driver issue or what? It's a brand new install of Vista (in fact, i've reinstalled several times) and nothing has even been loaded/installed yet.

This system was working fine for almost a year... I don't know what's gone wrong but I need it fixed - fast!

Edit: OK safe mode doesn't help. It froze again randomly, and when I unplugged the network cable I got a BSOD which flashed before the computer restarted.

Also, I'm noticing occasionally the computer, when it's frozen, makes that winding-down noise that you hear when you swtich off.. I think it's the hard disks? But then of course it does the opposite when it becomes responsive again.

I'm unclear on a few things:

You said it's been working fine for a year. Was that all on some version of Vista or a different OS?

Was this new "format/reinstall of Vista" the first time you've tried Vista (e.g. was it running on WinXP before you started having this problem?) This is related to question 1.

What kind of format did you perform?

When you say you are "re-installing", just what media are you using to do that (e.g. OEM 'recovery discs', a Vista Retail Install CD, a Vista OEM Install CD, a network install, etc.

Have you yet tried to minimize your configuration to absolute minimum hardware required to perform the install? (e.g. remove extra hard drives, memory, adapters, etc)

Have you tried installing in non-RAID0 configuration?


edit-
removed question answered by config details
add query re: non-RAID0 install attempt

Thanks for the reply -

- Yes, I was using the same operating system (vista), same hardware, everything. I only added a BD-ROM drive recently tho.

- The format I performed involved destroying the previous RAID0 configuration, and repartitioning the two now separate hard disks (creating a new 60Gb partition for Vista). One thing now while I think of it - when it came time to choose where to install the OS, according to my install guide it should have recognised my disks as [Drive X][Parition Y][Driveletter Z], but it came up with [Drive 0]Unallocated Space. So i clicked load driver to load the SATA/RAID drivers from another HDD, but a) it didn't find them without manually browsing to the location, and b) it didn't seem to make a difference once they were loaded... the disks appeared the same in the window. Does this mean I've installed the OS to an "unmounted" drive or something? I'm not sure exactly what that means.

- I'm using my Vista install DVD that came in the box, so not a ghost image or backup or anything.

- Kind of... to check it wasn't my power supply being overloaded (unlikely as it's been working fine) I unplugged one of the HDDs and the BD-ROM drive. That's all there is to spare really.

- Yep, that's what I'm doing now... it used to be a RAID0 config.

Update:
I told the computer to Shut Down and it even froze on the shutting down screen. But I got an error message this time:
"LogonUI.exe - Application Error
The instruction at 0x7597eb1e referenced memory at 0x7597eb1e. The required data was not placed into memory because of an I/O error status of 0x000000e.
Click on OK to terminate the program."
Maybe this helps.


Really appreciate any help you can provide

can't help but notice that your system is overclocked... try backing off to stock settings and see if that clears up the problems.

Oh... sorry the sig info is a little out of date. I've been using stock settings for a while now.

John,
I did a little, abet very little, digging around on this issue and it appears to have been rather prevelent in the XP OS back in 2006, and almost always pointed to a corrupted file or DLL.

Now having read some of the post, especially the one at:
http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/remark,15985372
brought to mind some issues I had a while back when I was multibooting across OSs but trying to share Programs and Documents folders between them and I ran into some very strange issues. You stated earlier that you had some confusion as to what partition the OS actually installed on. Is it possible that you have different boot and system partitions and that there may be code revision differences between the NTLDR and OS?

Gerritt

Hey thanks for the reply... the confusion was mainly about whether Windows Setup had actually loaded the SATA drivers it needed before windows was installed.
I'm having the problem even DURING the install process though, and I've since tried installing to the second hard drive (with the others removed), with the same problem.

A friend suggested it could be a master/slave issue... given that the two HDDs used to be in RAID0, could it be that now they are separate there is some confusion in that regard? I'd never worried about the whole master/slave thing before, I'd just plug the disks in and away we go...

Perhaps I could recreate the raid configuration exactly as it was, and see if the problem still exists...

On SATA there are no masters or slaves, but if you regenerated your RAID, there may be legacy issues.
The closest that you can get to a master/slave issue is if you have a RAID 1 (MIRROR), in which case it may become necessary for you to select one or the other drive to become the bootable (master) of the array, but elsewise this is a non-sequitor.

The Exe, that you seemed to have issues with shouldn't actually be running in MOST implementations after you've sucessfully logged in. This is what seemed to point to a bad DLL or exe on the reinstall.
Is it possible that the new BR-DVD is at fault?
Have you attempted a reinstall from an older DVD drive?

Gerritt

Hey - you were right! I disconnected the BD-ROM drive, plugged in my old DVD burner and installed from that. Everything was sweet! So relieved now...

Weird moment tho during windows setup... the dvd drive started making this huge noise like a lawnmower as if it was shredding the disc It scared the s**t out of me. I hit eject and put the cd back in and everything was fine... how odd..

Quick question though... I found on my Gigabyte motherboard, there are six "SATAII" ports, and two "GSATAII" ports that are a different colour. According to the manual, the six SATAII ports are controlled by the southbridge, while the two GSATAs are controlled by the Gigabyte SATA/RAID hardware controller.

So... what's the difference? Would I see a performance benefit from the Gigabyte-controlled ports?

John Holloway said:

I'm happy you're up and running now.
You should consider opening up a FAQ type forum thread here to inform others about your findings specific to the BD-ROM and installation issues.
Have you been able to reinstall the BD-ROM as a secondary optical device and maintained system reliability as of yet?
Insofar as the SATA/RAID controllers. You'll want all of your HDDs, at a minimum and all boot devices prefered, to be running through the SouthBridge SATA controller vs. the GB controller. The Southbridge SATA device controller is typically faster and requires less system overhead. Additionally, the system can be "confused" by utilization of both controllers for bootable devices. The Gigabyte SATA support actually shunts the SATA function through the PCI bus, thus increasing system overhead, though this is fine for additional optical devices that are not included in the BIOS bootable device list...such as your Blu-ray disk. It is still preferable in most cases to keep all of your SATA devices on the Southbridge.

Gerritt

Ah. Damn... I've just got everything set up with the HDDs on the Gigabyte SATA controller. I guessed that being a "dedicated" controller it would be more efficient. I would just switch them over but they're configured as RAID0 now... and to create a raid array using the other ports i'm guessing requires formatting the data... which i'm so not doing again!!

But yes... I've reinstalled the blu-ray drive and it works fine now. Everything is sweet. So I figure the problem was that Windows Setup couldn't read the installation data from the SATA optical drive properly, and thus when windows started, well, I dunno why exactly, but it kept locking up. Even though I'd loaded the Gigabyte SATA controller driver during setup. Weird...

Anyway many thanks for your help... much appreciated.

Well actually John, you may be mistaken, bet not necessarily so.
Depending on how the GB SATA controller works, you can very well flip the SATA drives over to the Southbridge and have them come up. Should is the operative term here.
If you totally turn of the GB chipset support of the SATA drives, and RAID.
AND you connect the drives on SATA0&1.
AND you enable the RAID support in BIOS.
AND you enable the transfered devices.
It should work...but only if you didn't attach other devices to the Southbridge SATA0 or 1 in the interim.
Be that all as it may, given your present situation and drive/driver configuration, you shouldn't have to make the transference.

Gerritt