Hard drive has me stumped [HELP!]

[kamakazispud]

So I am experiencing a weird issue with one of my hard drives in my desktop. I have a SSD C: for windows OS and a few games. I have a D: for storage and I have a B: for more storage. The B: is the volume that I am experiencing issues with.

Whenever I try to copy or load a file, the hard drive will "hang." I opened up the resource monitor under task manager and was watching what was happening when I was trying to read/write files off of this hard drive. The disk activity will shoot up to 100% and stay there until I cancel the file transfer or end the process that I am trying to load. Basically nothing will ever finish loading. The other drives are merrily humming along without any issues.

So i went into safe mode to see if I could identify any issues and tried again to copy files and/or run a file. IT WORKED FINE! No freezes, hangs, errors, etc. I tried going back to normal windows 7 x64 enviornment and tried messing with some files again. It was still acting slow. Basically I learned that the hard drive is fine. Even though I had already done this I thought I would try again; I went online to my motherboards website and downloaded the Intel sata driver package and the gigabyte sata driver package and installed both. Restarted the computer after installation and no change in performance, still slow. I tried reformatting the drive from my computer and under disk management and neither will let me reformat my B:. It says "Windows cannot reformat the system partition on this disk." I have tried uninstalling the storage device from device manager and that didn't help out either (windows reisntalled it for me).

If anyone has any tips for me I would really appreciate it. Thanks for the help.

My system specs are:
Intel Q6600 @ 3.0 GHz
4 GB DDR2 800 Ram
AMD 7870 GHZ
B:\ - WD 250 GB HDD
C:\ - OCZ 60 Gb HDD
D:\ Seagate 640 Gb HDD
1000W OCZ PSU
Gigabyte EP45-UD3R

 

[thebluebumblebee]

Have you tried assigning a different drive letter to it? Here's what Microsoft had to say about drive letters with XP:

A computer can use up to 26 drive letters. Drive letters A and B are reserved for floppy disk drives, but you can assign these letters to removable drives if the computer does not have a floppy disk drive. Hard disk drives in the computer receive letters C through Z, while mapped network drives are assigned drive letters in reverse order (Z through B).

 

[kamakazispud]

I will give that a shot. I recently reformatted my C: and my B:. having this drive assigned as B used to work fine before i reformatted

EDIT: It didn't work, thanks for the idea though

 

[micropage7]

how about re formatting and using non ntfs file system?

 

[t_ski]

If it works in safe mode, that is due to the driver not being loaded and it's using a generic driver. You probably have the wrong driver or at least an incompatible one. Look to see if there's a better driver for the controller that drive is connected to.

 

[kn00tcn]

If it works in safe mode, that is due to the driver not being loaded and it's using a generic driver. You probably have the wrong driver or at least an incompatible one. Look to see if there's a better driver for the controller that drive is connected to.

exactly... OP needs to confirm AHCI mode is enabled, intel chipset drivers installed, etc

could always uninstall all hard drive drivers in device manager, let windows auto detect, install latest intel ones or ones from gigabyte's support page

 

[95Viper]

Check the drive for errors.

If you have the option in your bios... make sure you do not have floppy drive enabled for drive "B".

Look in "Device Manager" for any problems ( be sure to check the "show hidden devices" in the menu) and make sure that drive is listed in the "Disk Drive" section.

Try starting windows with the "diagnostic" startup using "MSCONFIG" and test.
If your problem does not occur under the "diagnostic" startup then you can use the "selective" startup to try and find a possible culprit.
Be sure to run the configuration utility again to restore the boot back to normal, if needed.

Here is some more info on the Configuration Utility: Using Microsoft System Configuration (Windows 7)