is this system drive failure?

[franklloydwrong]

so i was mixing a song, and pro tools crashed, but it didn't give me an error, the entire program just immediately closed and the rack kept spitting out a horrible noise into my monitors (not white noise, more like a looped millisecond of the track). so i restarted my computer and launched pro tools again, and it stuck at "reading preferences" after loading plug ins, waveshell, etc. now pro tools is not responding. i restart with a forced quit. i launch pro tools again, and it seems fine. i return to mixing, and in the middle of playing, the entire computer freezes, the mouse wont move and ctrl+alt+del wont do anything. so i came to bed. i have never had a system drive failure before, and i was thinking this might be it. i have had the same hard drive for 6 years now, and i know they usually only last that long. i don't record to it or save anything on it, but i just wanted to make sure before i buy a new one. are there any other problems it might be? i have been using this setup for 4 years with the occasional crash (usually because of cpu usage or hardware buffer or whatever).. this is a new one and a mystery. thanks for any help.

btw: pro tools le 7.1/windows xp/2.5 ghz cpu/1.5 gigs ram/5400 rpm 80 gig system drive/ 7200 rpm 500 gig firewire media drive.

regards.

[Mradyfist]

so i was mixing a song, and pro tools crashed, but it didn't give me an error, the entire program just immediately closed and the rack kept spitting out a horrible noise into my monitors (not white noise, more like a looped millisecond of the track). so i restarted my computer and launched pro tools again, and it stuck at "reading preferences" after loading plug ins, waveshell, etc. now pro tools is not responding. i restart with a forced quit. i launch pro tools again, and it seems fine. i return to mixing, and in the middle of playing, the entire computer freezes, the mouse wont move and ctrl+alt+del wont do anything. so i came to bed. i have never had a system drive failure before, and i was thinking this might be it. i have had the same hard drive for 6 years now, and i know they usually only last that long. i don't record to it or save anything on it, but i just wanted to make sure before i buy a new one. are there any other problems it might be? i have been using this setup for 4 years with the occasional crash (usually because of cpu usage or hardware buffer or whatever).. this is a new one and a mystery. thanks for any help.

btw: pro tools le 7.1/windows xp/2.5 ghz cpu/1.5 gigs ram/5400 rpm 80 gig system drive/ 7200 rpm 500 gig firewire media drive.

regards.

Could be heat-related too, if it consistently runs for a while and then locks up hard. I actually doubt it would be a HD problem, because generally if a faulty hard drive causes a freeze, the mouse still moves.

[getreel]

What interface are you using that was spewing the noise? It could be RAM related or other hardware.

[stinkpot]

Have you tried trashing your preferences folders, restarting and relaunching PT? That seems to cure all kinds of goofy PT behaviours.

What about other programs on the drive. Do they run smoothly? Do you need to defrag or wipe the drive and reinstall the OS? Have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling PT? Have you tried booting in safe mode and rolling back to a system restore point that you know things were working fine?

Have you installed any new plugins recently? If so, have you tried uninstalling them and running PT?

Is the fan port on your computer clean enough to get good air flow in there? Do you have a pet that sheds alot near your computer? I've seen pet hair do really bad things to computers.

Do you have a wireless card and antivirus program running in the background that you could disable? Itunes or other invasive software running in startup?

Just brainstorming things I'd check into before trashing and replacing the drive.

Good luck!

[franklloydwrong]

repliers:
thanks for all of the tips. i'll answer as much as i can while at work:
i use a digi 002 with 1.5 gigs of ram

i don't think heat is a problem, we heat with gas,so to save money we keep it at 60 and the house is cold. i also have very little dust in my house. i usually use my computer for hours and hours at a time, and last night i only had it on for a half hour when this happened.

what is this preference folder, and how do i trash it? it did freeze at "reading preferences", so i wonder if this is linked.

i haven't tried any other programs since this happened, but i really only use this computer for pro tools and burning discs. i don't have antivirus or itunes or any other programs running. i have done the musicxp tweaking. i only use the internet every once in a great while when i need to email an mp3 to a client. i have system restore disabled, so that is not an option. i also have no pets.

the only weird thing is that i was using auto tune on this track, and i have never used it before last night, but it has been installed on my computer for over a year. i guess i might try uninstalling it to see if this is it.

so i have a few things to look at now when i get home. thanks for the help, and let me know about the preferences folder if you can.

and further...what exactly does a failing hard drive do? anything similar to this problem?

thanks.

[@?,*???&?]

The drive could be bad, but that's unlikely the root cause. My guess is the TOC (Table of Contents) is corrupt on the hard drive. The only way to verify this is reformat and check all sectors. I've seen this behaviour before with a bad TOC. Do you fanatically defragment and maintain that drive? Also, is this drive your system and data drive? If it is both, you should always have a 2nd drive dedicated to storing data only.

Discwarrior for a Mac checks the hardware independent of the TOC and can do so. Find a utility that will allow you to do something similar for your drive in the PC domain.

[Mradyfist]

and further...what exactly does a failing hard drive do? anything similar to this problem?

I've noticed that in general, when a hard drive starts to go on a Windows machine you'll have frequent times when Explorer (the process that's viewing the files on your computer, not the web browser) will either respond extremely slowly to an attempt to open random folders, or even stop responding at all. It will eventually take down your whole computer, but it's much more likely that you'd get a blue screen (or an auto restart, if you've left XP at its default) because it would fail on loading a particular driver. Having the entire system, including the cursor, freeze while opening PT seems unlikely.

As a side note, a dying hard drive on a Mac usually shows up as random beachballing at completely illogical times, like when switching fields on the login screen or navigating through folders.

[Mradyfist]

The drive could be bad, but that's unlikely the root cause. My guess is the TOC (Table of Contents) is corrupt on the hard drive. The only way to verify this is reformat and check all sectors. I've seen this behaviour before with a bad TOC. Do you fanatically defragment and maintain that drive? Also, is this drive your system and data drive? If it is both, you should always have a 2nd drive dedicated to storing data only.

Discwarrior for a Mac checks the hardware independent of the TOC and can do so. Find a utility that will allow you to do something similar for your drive in the PC domain.

Good point, this is much more likely than a physical problem with the hardware of a drive. Chkdsk will sometimes find errors, although I've had it give a clean bill of health to drives that ended up being bad. Sometimes you can reconstitute a drive by hard formatting (ie writing 0s to all blocks at least once), although it always makes me nervous to put critical data back on once its had problems.

[stinkpot]

Ok, this is really easy and it may fix your problem immediately. Even after doing this, as a matter of hard drive maintenance I'd still consider doing a complete fresh install of XP if it's been a while.

The perferences are at C:\Documents and Settings\your directory\Application Data\Digidesign

You should delete the DefauldDigiMIDISetup.dms, the Pro Tools versionPreferences.PTP, the Recent Files and Recent Folders stuff in the Digidesign folder.

If you're unable to see the Application Data folder go to folder options and check the box to enable seeing hidden folders.

Then go to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Digidesign\DAE\DAE Prefs

Delete the entire DAE Prefs folder.

Restart your computer.

Try opening a PT session and see if that works.

Let us know how it goes.

[franklloydwrong]

first of all, thanks for all the tips, again.

so i uninstalled auto tune, and everything works fine now (at least for the last 5 hours it has). so i guess it was just karma for trying to cheat instead of just learning to sing, but that's another thread.

as far as the deleting of preferences folders and such, is this something i should do anyways, even if everything is working? i don't want to fix what's not broke, but if it will pay in the end by enhancing performance/reliability, i will totally do it. do i delete the whole folders, or just the files inside of the folders?
thanks for the help.

[stinkpot]

I'm not surpised that Autotune was causing the problem. You can try to reinstall it and see if it works. I've done that successfully on one of my rigs.

Go ahead and delete all the files inside this folder, I keep the folder and just delete the files inside:

C:\Documents and Settings\your directory\Application Data\Digidesign

The entire DAE Prefs folder can be deleted. It will be recreated upon relaunching a session. The first time you launch PT after deleting the preferences, it will take longer to load, but just the first time.

It's not a bad idea to delete all of the preferences every so often as a matter of maintenance. I'd do it if I were you, especially after uninstalling and reinstalling Autotune. Any time I start getting weirdness with PT I delete the prefs and it seems to fix what ails me.

Plugin preferences are also deleted when you kill the DAE folder so I'm guessing something got buggy with Autotune and you should be able to reinstall and use it just fine after resetting the prefs.

Computer use, especially for audio/video is all about maintenance IMHO. Defrag religiously, once or twice a year do a clean install of XP - blowing away partitions included, delete your preferences every couple of weeks, update your BIOS if needed, surf the net responsibly if you're doing so on your music computer, etc. If you keep up on this stuff, there's no reason that your computer shouldn't work as well as the day you bought it, unless you're having a major hardware failure.

Glad to hear it's working better for you.