Unusual disk behavior and explorer.exe failures in Windows 7
Unusual disk behavior and explorer.exe failures in Windows 7
I encountered an unusual problem yesterday that has been challenging to resolve. It's causing frustration, so any advice would be appreciated. I was using the ArcheAge beta and the game suddenly stopped working. The screen froze, music kept playing, but it was just a bug. I switched tabs and the display went dark except for the taskbar, which remained frozen. The task manager didn't appear. Explorer.exe crashed completely. The shutdown process took a long time, and once it finally started, the taskbar stayed stuck. After restarting, the system froze again, and Explorer.exe crashed once more. Disk activity was unusually high, and Explorer kept failing even in safe mode. Before this crash, everything ran smoothly. I began troubleshooting by booting in safe mode and disabling startup items, but each restart made things worse. Disk usage spiked, Explorer.exe kept crashing, and boot time increased. I managed to run some antivirus scans with no results. Restoring from a Windows 7 installation didn't help, and even restoring from the second drive caused errors. I attempted to boot from a Windows 7 disk, but it was problematic. CHKDSK scans showed no issues. I have a second drive with Windows installed, so I tried using that. Initially, everything worked when accessing through the second drive, but after a few restarts, the same issues persisted. The system became extremely slow, with heavy disk activity and frequent Explorer.exe crashes. All components except the Samsung drives were around three years old. The MSI Z68A-GD80 i7 2600K is 4.5ghz with 16GB RAM, using Corsair Vengeance 1866 at XMP. The main drive is a RAID 0 setup with two 250GB Samsung EVO SSDs, and the secondary drive is a Crucial M4 128GB SSD. I also have a 1TB Seagate drive installed.
They should have considered this earlier. I’ll try it as soon as I get home.
I attempted to disconnect the RAID cards and revert the motherboard to AHCI settings, but the problems persist. I’m still using another SSD with Windows installed, and it takes a long time to boot. The drive status indicator stays fixed. In other programs, it doesn’t open immediately or closes after a short delay. The activity tracker in Task Manager isn’t displaying any clear data about disk usage, CPU, or memory.
It might be affected by unstable overclocks, faulty RAM, or possibly TRIM was turned on on the RAID SSDs. You might not be allowed to do that.