Intermitent Win7 Lockups

[DysfunktinaL]

Hi all,

I have Win7 Ulti 64 installed on my desktop (Details in signature). It's been running great untill this last week or so. A few days ago I woke up and went to work, and tried to remote desktop back to my system at home but was unable to connect. I could connect to other devices on my network, but not my personal system. When I got home I went and checked on it and it had rebooted but not loaded windows. It would pass through BIOS and Raid BIOS, but right before it should start loading windows it would just stop and sit there on a black screen.

This has happened a couple times over the last few days now. Occasionally my system will start locking up every 10-15 seconds for about 1 second, and then resume whatever it was doing, and then again non-stop. If I reboot while this is happening it will start doing what I described above. If I turn my system off and leave it powered down for about an hour or two it will boot up and run without any problems for ~24 hours.

I am not sure where the problem could be exactly. My first thought was my Raid0x4 array, but I do some pretty large file moves and I haven't ran into any corrupt files. My system does it's normal Sunday afternoon backups (a la windows 7 backup feature) to my backup disk without any errors and all the files located there seem intact with 100% integrity. The only real reason I would begin to suspect the drives though is because I work for WD, and I got the drives from an engineer who didn't need them anymore, but I am not 100% sure that they are totally good. I ran WinVista Ulti 64 on them for several months though without any errors.

I have tried using the windows 7 disk to run a repair on my OS as well. When I get to the screen, I load my raid drivers as normal, it takes a good 2-3 minutes to finish loading them, and then it goes into "Searching for Windows Installations". The first time it did this, I ended up giving up on waiting and let it run over night as I slept. When I woke up it was still scanning. I rebooted it right from there (so the system had been turned on and running for about 8 hours) and it booted right into windows and ran for another ~24 hours with no errors.

Has anyone experienced anything like this before on Windows 7? I had something like this when I first built my system and was using WinVista, but I did a normal repair of the OS and never looked back from there.

I bought a pair of OCZ 30G MLC SSD drives to put in Raid0 x2 and make it my primary boot drive, and I will be removing the 4x500g raid I have in there currently, and switch to using just the single 2TB WD Cav Black as my media/data drive. I hope this will resolve any issues I have. Any help would be much appreciated though.

Edited December 18, 2009 by DysfunktinaL

[DysfunktinaL]

So it just happened again... I had to fortune of actually being at my system when it started to act up. I took a couple minutes to catch up on msfn main page and saw the posts about the zeroday exploit. I figure it should be worth mentioning that I discovered that when my system starts acting up my CPU jumps from 0-1% to 66-90% spikes every 5-10 seconds. After reading a little bit and looking at the notice about the adobe exploit as well I remembered that I just last week installed reader to open a PDF spec sheet. Any chance this could all simply be a part of what's going around? If so, why does my system have to be shut down for an hour or two after crashing before it will even boot back into windows... Sigh... At least I have my iPhone to keep me entertained while I wait for my system to come back up.....

[todarsey]

Could it possibly be a driver that was updated during a windows update? Have you tried looking to see if a deiver was updated at the same time the problem started happening?

[DysfunktinaL]

I have not checked yet on that. I can't even get the darn thing to boot right now. I don't remember updating any drivers in the last couple weeks though. And if it was a driver issue I'd expect it to be a regular issue, not something that pops up at random uptimes. I was at ~11 hours when it went down last about 3 hours ago. Before that I had about 24 hours uptime, before that maybe like 5 or 6? When it's running fine I never turn the thing off. I've had my system at over 20 days uptime before on Vista, probably over 7 days at least since I installed Win7 a month or so ago.

It comes and goes for the most part. I do make it a point to check every update I apply before installing them. I like to know what MS is installing as a new 'feature' or update. I think the only thing I've downloaded in the last week was a TV show, Adobe Reader, and Windows Defender update.

Edited December 18, 2009 by DysfunktinaL