Tricky hard drive problem?

youcancallmeal

I think one of my hard drives is acting up, basically my PC keeps hanging momentarily when just doing normal stuff like internet browsing, listening to music etc. It has also crashed once or twice in the last few weeks.
Every time it hangs the following warning and error is recorded in the system event viewer

Warning
An error was detected on device \device\Harddisk2\D during a paging operation.

Error
The device, Device\Ide\IdePort2, did not respond within the timeout period.

Also I noticed it has the following event warning every now and then as well

The Driver has detected that device Device\Ide\IdePort2 has old or out-of-date firmware. Reduced performance may result.

First of all I presume this is my drive its referring to? I have four hard drives and they all check out under a basic S.M.A.R.T. test. I did a full diagnostic scan on my hard drive where I have windows installed and it came up clean. I also did quick scans on the other 3 hard drives and they all come back okay. I used the sammsung dos based diagnostic tool and also a seagate tool both of which are very thorough. Why would it be telling to update firmware all of a sudden if there hasn't been a problem up until now? I'm thinking I might disconnect my drive and see if the errors are still coming up? Anyone seen anything like this before, googling the errors gives back loads of different types of problems that relate to these messages?

youcancallmeal

Just read http://support.microsoft.com/kb/159865/#top and I've identified its actually my system drive (C:). I checked the paging file size and it wasn't at the recommended size. I've now set it to the recommended size so it may fix the problem?

Standard Toaster

Sounds to me like your HDD is on it's last legs. Backup you file off c befroe you do anything else.
You could move teh page file onto D if it helps things

youcancallmeal

I've had hard drive failures before and they have always failed extended diagnostics(Entire surface scans etc) thats why I don't think there isn't a problem with the actual hard drive. I've spent most of the morning googling the problem and came back with a few possible explanations/solutions.

- Loose/faulty sata cable?
- Hard drive controller acting up, install new chipset drivers?
- Check to see if settings on hard drive are for PIO or DMA mode?
- Check BIOS and see what ata settings there are?

Gonna check all this tonight when I get home. Going away for a year in a few weeks and I really want to get this sorted before I go.

youcancallmeal

For anyone else who might come across this problem it turned out it was a loose cable. I reseated the power and sata cables on all my hard drives and the errors haven't reoccurred since