Vista: Explorer.exe hanging and Disk PredictFailure flag is set...

BopNiblets

I noticed my explorer.exe is hanging a bit when I opened some folders

And just now I got this message:


So I fiddle around with Vistas Reliability and Performance stuff and see this:






Is my 500GB drives about to die?

Oh shi...! Please no...

Overheal

:eek:

do as the computer says: back up your criticals and run the chkdsk /f

it might not be dead it might just be some corrupted sectors fudging you up.....or it could be ****ed.
you have a couple other drives for which to save the files with as i understand it.

BopNiblets

But.. I don't have any space on any other drives to backup over 400Gigs of stuff... ohhh the humanity...

It seems to be even folders that aren't on that drive too, and when it was happening Vista hung during Shutdown too, ("Shutting down" screen and the spinning blue circle thingy)

I'm afraid to turn it on when I go home... might be time to buy one of those terabyte drives.

Stephen

You can get a 500GB external disk for about 90 euros - do it quick and back up your stuff. You can probably get the disk replaced under warranty but the data is usually worth far more than the disk it lives on!

Overheal

BopNiblets wrote: »

But.. I don't have any space on any other drives to backup over 400Gigs of stuff... ohhh the humanity...

stop downloading porn

seriously though i imagine with a Terabyte of space already, you have something you can expunge. Old videos you dont watch, clear out some game files, back up photos to DVD, etc.

I mean seriously YOU SHOULD NOT max out your hard drive capacities like that! 5%/11%/1%/1% :eek:

get each of those drives back above 15% free space. Maxing them out like that will do some considerable harm to them physically.

Stephen

Ehh... no it won't.

Capt'n Midnight

you should try to keep 15% or more free on your working drive as this makes it easier for the OS to avoid fragmenting files.
Fragmentation will mean the disk will have to do some extra work and reduce it's life slightly , but nothing to write home about.
In the Linux world defragging isn't something that's generally done, whereas in the windows world it's supposed to be a universal panacea.

For storage that doesn't change it don't make no difference how full the drive is.

www.hdtune.com will check the driver - try it AFTER you've backed up the stuff you can't afford to loose

BopNiblets

Hmmm, thanks guys, I might have to get a new drive, the Samsung 1TB (€125) on komplett looks to be the business, this is the first HD of many I've had over the years to cause any problems, a WD I got in Bangkok about 2 years ago.
I have a 74GB Raptor for OS and games, a 250GB and this 500GB and two external drives (120GB and 250GB) for everything else!

At the moment the drive hasn't fully died yet, but it's become basically unusable after about 10 minutes in Vista, after I boot up I can browse it and copy files from it for a while, but then it just makes explorer.exe hang and then accessing any of my other drives is the same, even if I connect my USB pendrive, it will just show the working cursor and a blank folder indefinitely and I have to kill the explorer.exe process.

Oh yeah, I ran "chkdsk /f" on it and no change, it's still hangs, I've disconnected it for the moment so I can back it up later.

Overheal

that may be because there is not enough free space for the swap file to function properly. Try getting C:\ back to 15%, defragment it, and see how your performance is after that.