BSOD crashes after a freeze period of 100% Highest Active Time while the Hard Disk actually appears to be idle

Question

After a few BSoD crashes of my Windows 7 that follow a period of semi-frozen environment, I have started monitoring my Resource Monitor to try to catch the culprit in act.

The symptoms are:

• The machine just freezes, and starts being non-responsive to almost anything. In the last incident, I was monitoring the Resource Monitor, and was able to move the mouse and click on the items in the window, but the rest of the system was non-responding (ctrl + shift + esc for Task manager, crtl + alt + delete for the same, nothing...).
• If I move the mouse outside of the borders of the active window (in this situation, the Resource Monitor) the cursor changes into the hourglass.
• When the system hung, the percentages slowly faded to non-usage, the green lines started disappearing from the graphs, but the Highest active time (the blue hard drive line) remained stuck at 100% all the time.
• After 1-2 mins of unresponsiveness, the system BSoD-ed.

This is the screenshot taken a few seconds before the crash: (the blue line is stuck to the top of the Hard Drive graph)

What is this blue line of hard drive activity and how can I see whats causing that activity while everything else seems to stand still? Do you have any idea what these symptoms point to?

The frequency of the BSOD crashes are about 1-2 every 4-5 hours, so a couple of times per day, with no apparent connection to the stress of the machine at the time.

Answer 1

From the description so far I'd say you're looking at disk failures. The disk shows busy not because it is constantly handling requests (plural), but because a single request isn't completing.

Check your system event log for errors in the Disk category. In Explorer, right-click on Computer and select Manage to get to Computer Management (or just Run compmgmt.msc). In the left pane, drill down to System Tools | Event Viewer | Windows Logs | System. Look for "Error"-level events from the source "Disk". If you see any at all, that's a problem.

Something else you should do is look at the minidump files to try to at least find out what the "bugcheck code" is. OSR has a free "dump reader" tool here that will spit out the results of the debugger's famous !analyze -v command for a dump you upload. Post a couple of them as edits to your question. Or, you can put a few of your minidumps in some public place like Dropbox, post a link, and people like me will look at them for you. The minidumps should be in \Windows\minidump .