Event Viewer gives me this message about a hard disk

Here’s the message:

An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk3\D during a paging operation.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at Microsoft Support.

Now, I do have 3 hard disks, one of which is divided into two partitions. My question: Which physical hard drive would this be referring to in the Device Manager (Win XP Pro), which shows the three drives as Disk 0, 1 and 2? Is it a logical conclusion that it’s referring to “Disk 2”? I did notice that at the time, accessing anything on that one was taking a long time.

Also, what does the D refer to after the last backslash above? I should add, all three are Western Digital Caviar “Blue” drives, SATA II. No RAID active at all.

USB flash drive error, perhaps?

No such USB drive was connected at the time. No thumb drive, no iPod, nothing.

EDIT: see below, it is in fact my USB connected iPod that’s having the problem. I was misreading the timestamp in Event Viewer as AM (when some other weirdness was going on) when in fact it was PM.

Open device manager, and for every storage device connected to your system, open the properties sheet, click Details and check the Physical Device Object Name. That might be the real device name rather than the pseudo path you get there. I’m not sure how to find the latter (without writing a program at least), maybe sysinternals have a utility for this?

So what was the actual error? Some can be safely ignored.

It’s Event ID 51. I’ve since figured out that it in fact was USB related–it seems to have a problem occasionally with recognizing my 5th Gen iPod (hard disk based). Sometimes it’ll start by calling it an “unknown USB device” and then after a while it gives me the “this device can perform faster” message as if I’d connected it to a USB 1.1. port. Needless to say I don’t think my system even has anything that’s not USB 2.0, so I can’t figure out what it is. Maybe a problem with the cable?

Have you got an older nForce motherboard, by any chance?

Nope, it’s an EP45-UD3R I got earlier this year. It used to do the "this device can perform faster thing occasionally on the Asus A8N-E I had in my previous system, though, and that’s an nForce 4 mobo, I believe.

Are you connecting the device directly to your computer? Front plugs on computers sometimes are effectively unpowered hubs too, so try a back plug and see if that helps.

If I were you, I would not bother trying to fuck around with XP in how it uses USB devices. I’m serious about that. You can easily get to a state where none of your USB devices work, or are barely working, and shortly after that you’re looking at registry and device manager errors and then your sniffing heroin off a dead hooker’s ass.

I could try that I suppose, but if these front USB ports are unpowered, how is my iPod getting its battery charged?

Well, that’s certainly a dire prospect! I was considering updating the USB drivers, or maybe see about getting a new cable (cheap source for that, BTW?).

Unless they’re part of a Windows update or motherboard firmware update, USB drivers probably won’t do anything, but I was being a bit sensational and it “might” not hurt to try if it’s either of those. If something does get screwed up, though, it’d be nearly impossible to undo with the way XP is ghetto-rigged into working with USB. As someone else mentioned, USB problems are often power supply problems of some sort, and in my experience once those problems cropped up I could not get them to go away, all the way up to the moment that my motherboard blew up. This was also a little while after getting lots of incompatibility and “Safely remove hardware” glitches with my iPod and then my Fuze.

I’m just suggesting that you live with it. If you can successfully sync your iPod without it disconnecting, I wouldn’t try to do anything about it unless the Microsoft support page has a specific solution to your problem.

www.monoprice.com for cheap USB cables

How do I check Event Viewer for system failures? I had a BSOD a few days ago, and a sudden power cycle/restart a few minutes later. In the last couple days a game intermittently keeps CTD’ing. (It’s the only game I’ve played recently.) I am modding but it crashes even when I haven’t made a change. (There’s a command that simply restarts the current mission without making you go back to the frontend GUI.) Thanks.

For BSODs you have nirsofts BlueScreenView, for non BSODs I usually just crawl through the event viewer.

Regardless of what I use, it’s nearly always a mystery what caused the crash.

Which parts of Event Viewer do I crawl? There are a large number of them.

Either System or Application, look for the red failures/crashes.

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Hell of a thread necro, BTW.