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SmashTheState's avatar

Win7 process lock-ups triggering RAID repairs. Solutions?

Asked by SmashTheState (14252points) December 19th, 2011

I have Win7 Premium, with four hard drives: one hard drive specifically for the OS (written to the outside of the platters and the rest of the drive unaccessible so that the drive head never moves and I get seek times faster than a Raptor), two identical 1 tb SATA drives in a mirroring RAID, and a 1 tb external drive.

My problem is that Win7 keeps locking up processes on a fairly regular basis (ie/ once every couple of weeks or so) so that they can’t be shut down, even from the task manager. I’ll be playing a game, the game will crash, and Win7 will refuse to terminate the process. Googling this shows others have the same problem. I can’t shut down properly because Win7 isn’t able to terminate all the processes properly, forcing me to do a manual reset.

When I reboot, about half the time it fuxx0rz my BIOS so that it forgets boot load order and I have to set it all again. Then when I do manage to reboot Win7, it triggers my RAID and I spend the next six hours twiddling my thumbs while it verifies and repairs data, during which time my computer is a very expensive paperweight.

Anyone have any suggestions or solutions? Don’t tell me to “switch to *n?x,” because I’m hostage to Windoze unless and until WINE achieves gold level emulation for the games and other software I use (after which I will have a snowball fight with His Satanic Majesty).

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7 Answers

blueiiznh's avatar

Have you performed a chkdsk on the OS volume?
If it is NTFS chkdsk /F /B /R will do extensive checks at boot time relative to bad sectors.
Please ensure you have good backups of your data.

SmashTheState's avatar

@blueiiznh I’m loathe to risk it, only because my Win7 install is OEM, so I don’t have the disc if anything should be corrupted or damaged. In any case, a lot of people are complaining about the same problem with Win7, that processes can’t be reliably shut down from the task manager, so I don’t think it’s my OS install which is the problem.

blueiiznh's avatar

@SmashTheState I completely understand. Task Manager has always done a piss poor job of killing things. I would suggest downloading Process Explorer if you want a better ability to control these kinds of things. Right Click | Kill in process explorer has saved my ass many a time on Enterprise Servers that I can’t take down.

SmashTheState's avatar

Alright, thanks, I’ll see if this helps. If not I’m holding you personally responsible for every bad thing which happens in my life.

blueiiznh's avatar

@SmashTheState hope it helps. Feel free to PM me specific details if you want now seeing I am on the hook for every bad thing which can happen in your life :)

XOIIO's avatar

you can make a batch file that says taskkill /f /im “taskname.exe” and at should kill it easily.

the100thmonkey's avatar

Are you running the game/process as administrator? Maybe the process has elevated privileges and you need to run task manager as admin.

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