system freezing when backing up HD

[markblasco]

My system seems to run fine, and I spent several hours today recording stuff without a hiccup. I hooked up my firewire drive and tried to back up my audio drive. After a few minutes it froze on me. I thought it might be a problem with my firewire drive (it is an older drive in an external enclosure) so I tried transfering some files from my audio drive to my system drive. This time it took about 1 minute before the system froze up.

I am running motherboard monitor which says my CPU temp is about 46. The Bios says that it is 50 when I restart it, but that should still be within safe limits. I ran a harddrive temperature test which said that at least one of my drives had a temp sensor and that it was 45, although it did not say which one. My audio drive is a brand new seagate 80gig drive, and the system drive is an older maxtor I took from my last computer.

What I am wondering is if any of you know of a program that can run in the background, so that when my system crashes it can tell me why. Does something like this exist? I tried a google search but diodn't seem to come up with anything? Does anyone have any suggestions as to why the system might crash during a file transfer? Thanks

[albee1952]

I don't know if this will help, but if your firewire drive is formatted FAT32, it will not accept a backup file larger than 4 gig. That just hit me when I tried to back up a hard drive (40 gig drive) and it quit after 10 minutes. I reformatted the firewire drive to NTFS and the backup went fine (I restored to a new drive the next day and it all came back). Knowledge is power.

[midigod]

Is this a backup just from explorer?
Have you tried right after rebooting?

You've used this firewire drive before presumably?
What's changed?

Can't you just turn dr watson on in xp ?!

Make sure you have 1gb free space on c and no more than 20 files in its root.
Error check and defrag "all" the drives.
Make sure your recycle bin is empty.
Clear your temp & windows temp folder.
Your swap file should be 1-5 ~ 2.5 your physical memory depending.

Also try copying using a utility like BEYONDCOMPARE from http://www.scootersoftware.com/

Probably worth getting the latest windows updates for the firewire driver.

I'd recommend trying sisoft sandra
http://www.sisoftware.net

And anticrash seemed good but may or may not help.
http://www.dachshundsoftware.com

All software has 30 day eval, etc.

The only time I had this disk freezing was when my cpu wasn't cooled "evenly" and the cpu clock speed had fallen back. This was to the main internal drive, not firewire btw.