Hi all hoping you guys can help me out on a problem that has plagued me for the past week I have Steam installed and it was playing fine up until last week when during a game of nom nom (Left 4 Dead 2) I suddenly began to get freezes every 30 seconds for about 2 secs. This gradually got worse unto around a 10 second freeze at which point I was causing grief to my team mates because it seemed as though I was AFK for that period . At this point it was only happening in L4D2. When I exiting the game Steam notified me that L4D2 was fragmented. 2TB WD Green drive (never caused problem before all other games running without a hitch). I took its advise and defragged using Defraggler. From 16% its down to 0% (still some file there). Tried it again still no joy. So I thought lets uninstall L4D2 and reinstall it without touching steam client. No Joy. Ok lets try uninstalling steam and moving steamapps and userdata out and bringing them back when reinstalled. No Joy. Ok lets try installing everything a fresh (Steam and L4D2). Still No Joy. I don't think its the hard drive as no other game is being affected with the same symptoms. Unfortunately now the problem has moved onto Steam itself. When loading it will work fine then freeze and crash without closing the program even when try "end process tree". This mean a hard reboot So at the moment I am at a loss. I have tried searching the fixing on Steam Forum but nothing that I can find really helps. If anyone has any suggestion I would be really appreciative and so would my team mates in fact you'll get a virtual Boomer hug and Spitter kiss for your troubles
have you tried defragging the game cache of the games affected? right click the game affected, select properties, then local files, then defragment local games cache
Sounds more like to me that it could be the HDD. If you've got a bad sector right where steam is. Try running a health check with HDTune and see if it picks anything up, just to be sure.
Did try that when Steam initially notified me of the problem but it didn’t help. I will give HDTune a go. For 2TB hard drive how long does the process of checking take ?
Tried HD Tune with the error scan and some of the areas have shown up in red. According to the legend they are damaged. So at the moment I am deciding to transfer my Steam Apps and User Data to another drive and reinstall steam on there. Hopefully if it was the drive this should work around the problem. Only problem then is to replace the 75% full 2TB drive Once done Ill report back with the results. Thank you for your help guys!
How old is the drive? Out of warranty? If you've got red sectors then I would put money on it being that causing the problem. I had a drive that had my page file on, which turned out to have some bad sectors. The PC had started crashing randomly all the time.
The drive was second hand bought of eBay. I have used the drive for about 2 years. Originally I assumed it was WD but I just realised that was the last drive I purchased so I think its my Hitachi 2TB one that has gone. Had problems with Hitachi spin-point before that's why i went to WD Green drives for there reliability. When I was transferring the Steam Apps and User data folder to my other WD Hard Drive I noticed that some of the files wouldn't transfer or where taking over 20 min to transfer a single .dll file. So it does seem as though its located on bad sectors of the drive.
Look into SpinRite as a fix. It will cost you a few bucks, but I have seen it fix many hard drives to at least get them working again. http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm
Having moved the Steam and installed the client again on the WD drive it all seems to be working fine (fingers crossed!) I am looking into purchasing another WD Green drive 2TB so that I can clone the data across (some files may not copy so I might have to transfer manually) Just want to thank you guys for helping me!!! nom nom time is back on (just in time for blood harvest) ^___^*
