5 replies to this topic

[Uncle Ted]

If the mechwarrior process hanging made it so you could no longer see your hard drives, then you have a bigger problem than MWO.

Consider running a stress test like Prime95 for a few hours to see if you are "heat stable". Hard drives shouldn't disappear from Windows just because a game crashed.

[Sleipnir]

Just for reference, I run a 64-bit Windows 8 OS system, so it's most likely not that. Haven't had any issues since upgrading to Win8.

[Uncle Ted]

Prime95 is just the name of a program. It heats up your CPU and eats a lot of RAM. It's used to test stability on a wide variety of Windows versions.

Another (better) test would be letting one of the FutureMark 3D benchmark programs run overnight to see if your rig crashes/hard drives disappear.

There's literally no way, programatically, that MWOMercs.exe took the hard drive settings out of your BIOS.

Good luck and see you in Battle!

[Carmaga]

This is just a suggestion: if the problem is only related to your hard drive. Not for psu poweroutput neither to mobo.

I have similar problems with all of my "Green Line" hard (mechanical and SSD) drives because everything green and ecological is sexy nowdays. Their APM (Automatic Power Management) is set for maximum energy saving state instead of performance. And there is no magic permanent workarounds cause it's programmed in-to the firmware. For a permanent workaround, you should go with "Black line" hard drives on your desktop computer - without any "green" neither with "energy saving" stuff.

With green line HD's you get these "spinning downs"/"power off's" due the APM and it does exactly what you wrote up there on the OP, specially if you are using older motherboards (eg. 775). And yes, you can bypass these issues.

People are recommending to set windows cache in-to the drive which is under strong APM control. But I wouldn't do that because when APM activates the HD and powers it off from the system -- you'll end up to bluescreen which is more nasty than running partially disabled system. And people are also recommending that you should change windows power management settings for your hard drives that they would never power off your HD (default is in interval of 20 minutes). But that doesn't work cause APM is programmed to firmware.

What I suggest is following:
1) Crystal Disk Info a free program with advanced tools for modifying AAM/APM values. It installs itself to system tray and it needs to be constantly running. It does not write a thing to firmware. It's just out there to keep your HD's alive. Also Crystal Disk Info tells you in the simple way is there problems in your S.M.A.R.T. not to mention about HD temperatures and other HD related stuff. (remember to activate AMM/APM override from main drop-down menu)

OR

2) KeepAliveHD. A free program that writes every now and then small text file to your hard drive to keep it alive.

OR

3) You can do this manually. The idea is to create a small batch that runs every 5 minutes to keep your HD alive with minimal impact to computer performance.

Open notepad and copy-paste this following code:

Set WshShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
 
WshShell.Run chr(34) & "e:\spinning.bat" & Chr(34), 0
 
Set WshShell = Nothing

In my case I have problematic "E:" drive. Change the dive letter to match yours. Save the file to the root of your problematic HD (In my case E:\) and rename it as:
stop_spinning.vbs

Open notepad again and copy-paste the next code:

echo a > e:\stop_spinning_down.txt

Save it in the same location (as you saved the "stop_spinning.vbs") as:
spinning.bat

This code writes to the root of your HD a small text file containing a letter "a" without quotas.

All you need to do now is to add stop_spinning.vbs to your scheduled tasks and put parameters in that it runs the .vbs in 5 minute interval. And your HD does not do that APM green-stuff any more.

Edited by Carmaga, 12 March 2013 - 04:25 PM.

[CMGrendel]

I've been a hardware engineer for 17+ years. I say this not to flash e-peen but to highlight the correctness of the above posters.

Whilst it IS possible for software to trash HDDs, it's not possible to effect your bios settings. What you are describing is typical of either a faulty drive, motherboard or power supply. It could even be due to a faulty CMOS battery, but that's the least likely option.

Best of luck with your problem, but I don't think MWO is your core issue. Any sufficiently aggressive benchmarking program should eventually trigger the same issues.


EDIT:

The above poster Carnaga seems to have a solid lead on the issue.

Edited by CMGrendel, 12 March 2013 - 04:10 PM.