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| Failure to display security and shut down options (faulty WD5000AADS) Posted: 15 Dec 2010 10:08 PM PST Another strange problem with an almost-new PC. Another high-end PC, that was taken back to the original manufacturer (a long distance away) twice… first to fix a faulty video card and power supply, then they are unable to fix this strange computer slowdown. The PC uses an Intel mobo, a quick, late-model NVidia display card, a quad-core intel CPU, a WD5000AADS drive, W7-64bit, and a good power supply. Its only got WoW and Norton running on it. Everything is less than 6 months old, so there shouldn’t be and problems. Whats unusual, is that the system boots normally, and at some point, will suddenly start running very slow… I also note that the hard drive light is on – solid, while the slowdown happens. The only other symptom is that the PC is “usually” very slow to shutdown… about 5 minutes… where I would expect about 10 seconds! So, my first guess is that its a hardware fault. I run various RAM tests (including the built-in W7 RAM test)… no fault after an overnight run. I look at the hard drive SMART settings: everything looks normal… a clean bill of health. Next stress test the Video card and the CPU… but the stress test runs normally. OK, what about the W7 event viewer. I can see the graphics card fault from about 2 months ago, but the only other error is a warning that the system took a long time to shut down… but no specifics. Next, I replace the video card… but the slowdown is still there. At one point, while trying to start the task manager, I get the following error: Failure to display security and shutdown options… The logon process was unable to display security and logon options when Ctrl + Alt + Delete was pressed. Now thats a doozey! It must take a lot to stop task manager from starting! A virus scan finds nothing wrong. So I try updating the BIOS. Nope. Ah! the jokers who setup the PC installed W7 with the hard drive id IDE mode. I switch to AHCI mode, and everything looks fine for a while, but the slowdown soon re-appears. I start clutching at straws, and disable wmpnetwk.exe (it seemed to be using a lot of CPU at one stage). On a forum somewhere, I see a vague mention of replacing a faulty drive… I figure: its worth a shot… even though the drive doesn’t give the typical signs of failure, many things are pointing that way. So I clone the 500Gb WD5000AADS drive to a 250Gb Seagate. The clone process works perfectly (many faulty drives are just not cloneable). After installing the 250Gb drive, the slowness just disappears! I am completely amazed that a drive can have such a “quiet” fault, that its almost impossible to test for it without first replacing the whole drive. Related posts:
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