is it showing an event at the time of the freeze or is it not logging and just showing a unexpected shutdown??
i have a computer in production doing this and oh my if we have the same issue id love to help find a fix
EDIT: turns out it was bad ram, could not get memtest to boot last time i was working on this but having checked logs it hasnt crashed in 20+ days
Might be getting somewhere the last two times it’s happened I’ve managed to have the task manager performance bar open. Both times the C drive has been running at 100% as soon as the freeze happens and never drops.
Now nothing has shown up in virus scans. Could it be a faulty M.2 card, it is 4 years old now
@kenkoda as far as I can tell it’s not showing any errors just logging that I held the power button down to switch it off
There are known bugs around 100 percent disk usage… worth exploring.
The main boot drive is only about 50 % full never got near 100
You could check your system drive for errors. It also won’t hurt to run a Memtest, just to be sure.
I find it odd that there is no error message at the time of the freeze…
Ok so not managed to get a Memtest to run without the machine freezing. Does anyone know if Memtest tests the drives as well cause my C:\ Drive is running up to 100% so not sure if that’s part of the problem as well
Update
Managed to get the Memtest to run 5 times and no errors found. I’m starting to lean on the prospect of a faulty m.2 card
Right before buying a new drive decided to do a full reset back to windows 7 and start fresh.
While updating everything I switch the monitor off come back switch it on no image on screen. Unless anyone has any new ideas I’m going to go with the m.2 card is faulty
Memtest86 in the bootable environment does not use the HDD what so ever. If it fails this, then something is up with your ram.
As for the M.2, you should check for badblocks. Linux is easiest to test this with.
# assuming /dev/sda is the C: drive
sudo badblocks -nsv /dev/sda
Lack of graphic output is not necessarily a boot drive.
This is were I would start… Scan for malware and viruses. Then I would look to clean up the full drive of stuff you do not want or need. Duplicate files, empty folders ect… Go into advance setting and look to see how your paging files across the drives are set up. Get off windows 7
Treat that window install with disdain. Nuke it and rebuild.
You slipped on linux
That’s what I know well. Besides, sfc /scannow doesn’t do a good enough job.
Ya mostly … not very useful. He may have an actual hardware problem ? It seems like software corrupt/ malware/virus. Windows… ya know.
I agree that even running a bootable usb of linux distro is a wealth of info quick.
@thevillageidiot ok I ran a couple of scans when windows 10 was installed with a few different programs nothing showed up. Managed to get Memtest to run a 5 cycles showed up no errors.
The only reason I went back to windows 7 was that’s the copy I have. I can get back to windows 10 through all the updates just takes a while. For the install I did a full format of the m.2 card so if it was corrupt software that should be an issue after the format
Will give Linux a go and see what it throws up. Any recommendations on which to use never used Linux before
The fact that you are booted back in means the problem lies within windows or something you have done. If you have installed windows 10 before ? Maybe be safe and follow the install path of 7 to 10. Before you do… move your data off that drive and unhook the other drives just to be safe.
Yes… you have something weird going on . 100 percent drive usage unless justified and done on purpose is not norm. Some current bugs in windows can explain that or default to malware or virus.
Yeah, since we’re just doing test use gpartedlive.
https://gparted.org/livecd.php
write that to a flash drive then boot it with your system. One the splash screen you should see the area to select to run memtest, and then after that to test the drives boot into the live environment and use the gparted utility
3 things:
My machine (Haswell based E3 Xeon) got meltdown/spectre related Windows updates in March or thereabouts which absolutely killed system stability for me. In my case the machine would just suddenly lose power and turn off (within maybe 1 hour of uptime, seemingly at random. the system had power, but it was like an ACPI hard power off, as if you held the power button down). But YMMV. The april updates resolved the issue (for me, on haswell. maybe other processors might be different).
I’d seriously suggest checking to see if updates correlated with your issues, because in my experience, the roll out of the meltdown/spectre updates has been a complete shit-show, and the behavior you’re seeing may be just a different symptom of this problem (due to different CPU architecture being affected differently or similarly broken by a different revision of these updates).
The disk space thing may be a different issue you have with your box…
edit:
i see your system is haswell-based as well, but on Z97, i was on H87 chipset. Still, i’d definitely suggest checking the Windows update situation out. You may well find that a clean install patched up to april might be fine now.
Ok so finally got windows 10 installed again. Complete fresh install and completely wiped the drive and there’s only one drive connected in the machine. After starting to update the machine the freezes started happening again
First thing you should do is go into the bios and set everything back to stock clocks if it isnt already. I’d actually recommend resetting the bios with safeboot/failsafe settings, save your current settings in a profile if you want. Second, Update the drivers only from the manufacturer. Relying on windows update for this usually means old out of date stuff.
If you still experience lock ups I would move on to using the machine via live USB linux and see if the same thing happens in linux. If it does you need to start removing components until you get a stable machine. If it doesnt happen again in linux its safe to assume a windows update issue and you can begin removing them until you get a stable system again. This can be tedious but necessary to narrow down which update you want to avoid.
This is a hardware issue. Things to try:
I’ve never seen a w10 machine just lock up from a software issue, but I dont know if its entirely out of the realm of possibility. It definitely smells like hardware to me.