I've got this corrupted or failing hard drive where I keep all my games. It's frustrating because whenever the drive messes up, my whole computer crashes—like when I'm just watching a movie or playing a game that doesn't even touch the drive. I'm looking for any tips or tricks to reduce these crashes when I'm not actively using the hard drive. I'm aware it's damaged, but is there anything I can do to keep my PC from crashing?
4 Answers
Honestly, the best move is usually to just replace the failing drive. It’s not worth the hassle trying to salvage it, especially since drives are pretty cheap these days. You'll save yourself a lot of time and effort in the long run!
To really diagnose those crashes, you need to grab your dump files from Windows. They’re basically crash logs. If you can boot into Windows—or even Safe Mode—check the C:WindowsMinidump directory. Zip those files up and upload them; it really helps in figuring out what’s going wrong!
I found some dump files and uploaded them here: [link to files]. Hopefully, they’ll give some clues!
Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do if the drive is already acting up. Your system will need to access that drive for various tasks, and if it’s unreliable, crashes are just going to happen. If you can, try to move your OS and apps to a different drive, but if that’s not an option, you might just have to accept the crashes for now.
I never realized how many programs depended on that drive! Looks like I might need to prepare for these crashes as my only option.
You might want to try disabling Windows Search services. It could be that it’s trying to access the failing drive while indexing stuff, causing those annoying crashes. Just check your settings to see if that helps!
I already set the 'Find My Files' option to classic and excluded that drive from the index. Still not sure if it’s working as intended.
Yeah, I get that. Money’s tight for me right now, so I’m trying to make do with this drive instead of uninstalling a ton of games.