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Harddrive failure and 100% CPU under Win2K, Help Needed!

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Join Date: May 2004

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Harddrive failure and 100% CPU under Win2K, Help Needed!

May 26th, 2004

Hello everyone, I'm having a very frustrating problem I was hoping someone could help me with.

First off, these are the system specs.

Windows 2k (service pack 3)
2.6c Mhz Pentium 4 (hyperthreading disabled)
512MB of Corsair DDR
ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe Motherboard
120GB Maxtor Serial ATA HD

A few days ago my computer was running a little slow so i decided to do a restart. On restarting and just as you see the hint of blue desktop before anything gets the chance to load, the computer closes down suddenly like I've turned the power off and restarts itself, gets to the same point and blam, same thing...tried starting in safe mode with no luck.

I happened to have a fresh 40GB Western Digital drive handy (parallel) so decided to reformat and install windows on that to see if I could get the system to boot. It does, BUT... with my cpu constantly running between 94 and 100% slowing everything to a crawl. This happened directly after a fresh install on a fresh drive. There is no possible way i could have picked up a virus or malware from the internet as I hadn't been online before noticing the problem. Running a virus scanner (McAfee), Spybot, hijackthis and cwshredder show nothing

I've had issues in the past with the SVCHOST thingy, where I've needed to install 2 hotfixes from microsoft before getting online otherwise I get similar symptoms to these, CPU at 100% etc...but normally a fresh reinstall would fix that, not in this case. It's happening from word go.

Is it possible my hardware has become damaged somehow? and why the harddrive failure with the Maxtor but the Western Digital will boot to windows only to max out my CPU??? Would a boot virus cause this kind of mischief?

I'm really at a total loss and would appreciate ANY help on the matter.

Thanks to everyone who bothers to read this!

Take Care,
Stuart.

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Join Date: Sep 2004

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snowbyrd

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Re: Harddrive failure and 100% CPU under Win2K, Help Needed!

Sep 7th, 2004

I am a nube new to this forum. You couldn’t have described my symptoms more succinctly. I have contacted my computer support division at work to solve this problem as this is the forth case in as many weeks that I have heard of. I will post a reply if they are successful.

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Join Date: Sep 2004

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macnutbkp

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Re: Harddrive failure and 100% CPU under Win2K, Help Needed!

Sep 8th, 2004

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Originally Posted by BrokenGhost

Hello everyone, I'm having a very frustrating problem I was hoping someone could help me with.

First off, these are the system specs.

Windows 2k (service pack 3)
2.6c Mhz Pentium 4 (hyperthreading disabled)
512MB of Corsair DDR
ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe Motherboard
120GB Maxtor Serial ATA HD

A few days ago my computer was running a little slow so i decided to do a restart. On restarting and just as you see the hint of blue desktop before anything gets the chance to load, the computer closes down suddenly like I've turned the power off and restarts itself, gets to the same point and blam, same thing...tried starting in safe mode with no luck.

I happened to have a fresh 40GB Western Digital drive handy (parallel) so decided to reformat and install windows on that to see if I could get the system to boot. It does, BUT... with my cpu constantly running between 94 and 100% slowing everything to a crawl. This happened directly after a fresh install on a fresh drive. There is no possible way i could have picked up a virus or malware from the internet as I hadn't been online before noticing the problem. Running a virus scanner (McAfee), Spybot, hijackthis and cwshredder show nothing

I've had issues in the past with the SVCHOST thingy, where I've needed to install 2 hotfixes from microsoft before getting online otherwise I get similar symptoms to these, CPU at 100% etc...but normally a fresh reinstall would fix that, not in this case. It's happening from word go.

Is it possible my hardware has become damaged somehow? and why the harddrive failure with the Maxtor but the Western Digital will boot to windows only to max out my CPU??? Would a boot virus cause this kind of mischief?

I'm really at a total loss and would appreciate ANY help on the matter.

Thanks to everyone who bothers to read this!

Take Care,
Stuart.

I've never had any good success with Maxtor harddrives. As far the the boot virus, it's very possible. I'd rip out the Maxtor drive and leave the WD in there and then do a fresh install from there. It's possible that it may be trying to access both drives. Search on Google for details on how to do a low-level format which might help your problem.

Hope this helps!

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Join Date: Jan 2004

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antioed

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Re: Harddrive failure and 100% CPU under Win2K, Help Needed!

Sep 8th, 2004

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Originally Posted by BrokenGhost

I've had issues in the past with the SVCHOST thingy, where I've needed to install 2 hotfixes from microsoft before getting online otherwise I get similar symptoms to these, CPU at 100% etc...but normally a fresh reinstall would fix that, not in this case. It's happening from word go.

I've seen this happen to the point where they couldn't make it through setup before getting rebooted...you should run the MS critical patches first. If it was a virus causing this you would first want to remove the virus's capability of attacking your vulnerability by running the patch. There's steps you can take to block the traffic but you might as well get the patches. I believe this was the patch for that. Another one that seems to be causing a lot of folks trouble is the LSASS vulnerability...patch for Win2K here

Check for viruses using Stinger from McAfee.

Also, are you running a firewall? A firewall could cause this problem but could also help. On the DCOM virus you could work around by taking these steps as stated by Microsoft:

WORKAROUND

Although Microsoft urges all customers to apply the security patch at the earliest possible opportunity, there are some workarounds that you can use to help prevent the vector that is used to exploit this vulnerability in the interim. There is no guarantee that these workarounds will block all possible attack vectors.

Note These workarounds are temporary measures because they only help to block paths of attack instead of correcting the underlying vulnerability.

Block UDP ports 135, 137, 138, and 445, and TCP ports 135, 139, 445, and 593 at your firewall.

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Join Date: Sep 2004

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Leathers

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Re: Harddrive failure and 100% CPU under Win2K, Help Needed!

Sep 24th, 2004

Stuart,

Although you didn't get a reply, enough time has gone by that I would hope you have had a solution or resolution to your problem.

My problem is similar, we're running the same OS and I had the same reboot series, though I didn't go so far as to install a new HD.

My CPU is running at 100% near constantly and anything that I try in regard to CWS or else is meeting with a brick wall.

Any insight or help that you (or anyone else) could offer would be appreciated.

Sincerely,

Mark Leathers

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Originally Posted by BrokenGhost

Hello everyone, I'm having a very frustrating problem I was hoping someone could help me with.

First off, these are the system specs.

Windows 2k (service pack 3)
2.6c Mhz Pentium 4 (hyperthreading disabled)
512MB of Corsair DDR
ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe Motherboard
120GB Maxtor Serial ATA HD

A few days ago my computer was running a little slow so i decided to do a restart. On restarting and just as you see the hint of blue desktop before anything gets the chance to load, the computer closes down suddenly like I've turned the power off and restarts itself, gets to the same point and blam, same thing...tried starting in safe mode with no luck.

I happened to have a fresh 40GB Western Digital drive handy (parallel) so decided to reformat and install windows on that to see if I could get the system to boot. It does, BUT... with my cpu constantly running between 94 and 100% slowing everything to a crawl. This happened directly after a fresh install on a fresh drive. There is no possible way i could have picked up a virus or malware from the internet as I hadn't been online before noticing the problem. Running a virus scanner (McAfee), Spybot, hijackthis and cwshredder show nothing

I've had issues in the past with the SVCHOST thingy, where I've needed to install 2 hotfixes from microsoft before getting online otherwise I get similar symptoms to these, CPU at 100% etc...but normally a fresh reinstall would fix that, not in this case. It's happening from word go.

Is it possible my hardware has become damaged somehow? and why the harddrive failure with the Maxtor but the Western Digital will boot to windows only to max out my CPU??? Would a boot virus cause this kind of mischief?

I'm really at a total loss and would appreciate ANY help on the matter.

Thanks to everyone who bothers to read this!

Take Care,
Stuart.