Random Win7 locks-ups/freezes on playback

[macgaiver]

Hardware:
MB: ASUS M4A78
CPU: Phenom x4 965
GPU: ATI Radeon HD4850 512Mb(Cube 3d)
RAM: Corsair DDR3 4GB

Software tested:
BIOS: several versions - last one v2304
Windows 7 Professional: build - 7600.16385.amd64fre.win7_rtm.090713-1255
VLC: from v0.9.6 - v1.0.5
ATI Catalyst drivers from 9.10 - 10.3
Realtek audio drivers from 6.0.1.5859 - 6.0.1.6050

Problem description:

When doing playback in VLC, it freezes. Sound and picture stops, mouse and keyboard is still responsive for few seconds, i can click on other active windows, but after few seconds Windows become completely unresponsive. As soon as problem starts my HDD activity led turns on and stay active. Only way to get out of this is hardware reset.

I looked around in many forums - it always end up same way - "probably a hardware issue" and no solution
I do not agree, cause WMP11 or Quicktime player or Winamp, or Windows Classic Player do not have such issues,. It might be drivers. As it is complete hang of PC it might be related to interrupt handling.

i know this information is insufficient to give you idea about where the problem is, so my question is there some kind of debug mode/build that I could use to get all necessary information about these crashes? So that ether to find out is this VLC problem or not, of if it is - how to fix it.

Thanks.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

OK, try VLC 1.1.0-pre1

[macgaiver]

I'm lost now

As latest pre-release version also had same problem i started to use Winamp for movies and guess what!!! Same problem!! It took me week to get it. With VLC it happens much faster.

Membest , prim95 test indicated no problems, setting up power levels in BIOS (from "auto") also didn't make any difference. Now going trough windows 7 services that might be involved in this problem...

I would appreciate any ideas.

[VLC_help]

If you have a spare display adapter, try it.

[macgaiver]

got my old Radeon x1600 out of the box - still the same.

On one of the freezes got distracted with a phone call and accidentally found out that - in ~3-4min system comes back to life as nothing ever happened.

This problem is exactly the same for every video player i tried - only frequency of problem was different.


With this new information i found one interesting possibility:
http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Internal-A ... 81/page/21
http://techreport.com/discussions.x/15863

as i have exactly the same HDD it might be it, but I still can't decide whether is worth to risk my whole data to try it....

[macgaiver]

OK - information for those with similar problems.

i moved my WIN7 to other physical HDD (made a partition clone with Norton Ghost from Hiren Boot CD) and problem was gone.

So:

if operating system was on Seagate 7200.11 1.5Tb and was playing moves from same HDD - freezes was regular - once every 15-30min
if operating system was on Seagate 7200.11 1.5Tb and was playing moves from Seagate 7200.10 320Gb HDD - freezes was once in few hours.
if operating system was on Seagate 7200.10 320Gb HDD and was playing moves from Seagate 7200.10 320Gb HDD - no problem (so far)
if operating system was on Seagate 7200.10 320Gb HDD and was playing moves from Seagate 7200.11 1.5Tb HDD - no problem (so far)

Finally I have good reason to buy Solid State Drive!!!

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Increase VLC cache.

[VLC_help]

The problem is with hard drive. Some models are faulty.

[macgaiver]

Seagate support informed me that i have latest firmware version for my HDD and it should have all the fixes.

But in this case it is obvious that something was wrong with HDD, cause moving system to other harddrive solved my problems

[paintball9029]

just a note, seagate drives are crap. ive had to replace way too many of those in the last few months. they start clicking, have trouble seeking and reading files randomly. over the last 3-4 years they have started using factories in china to create their drives and have cheaped out on a lot of parts. its beginning to show. ive lost way too much data to these drives to bother going back to seagate ever. i'll spend the extra 10 bucks a drive to get a wd that lasts a few years. my last one that i had i narrowed the problem down to the sleep function they praise when you buy the drive. it liked to randomly come into effect while the drive was in use. i would have a 500g transfer going and it would suddenly crash and then come back if i hit try again about 15 seconds later. this time period for crashing would quickly shorten until i couldn't even turn on the drive. get your stuff off those drives while you still can.

EDIT I forgot to say, this only affects the 3.25" drives. the 2.5" laptop models do not suffer from this.