Windows 8: Disk Usage at 100%? Nothing Responds

Question

Lately my Windows disk usage has been "sky-rocketing" to 100% and then everything freezes up, nothing is responding. I can’t even open the menu from sliding my mouse to the top right corner and I can’t grab the top of my screen with the mouse. Kind of just seems like I'm looking at a picture.

I've already looked in Task Manager to see what’s causing it and I can't find anything. Everything seems calm but at the top it displays Disk: 100%.

It will stop after about 15 minutes and everything will be fine and back to normal, then when I get on the laptop later and boot it up again the problem persists.

Solution 1

I had the same problem, and I did everything that the others suggested to fix it, but nothing worked.

Finally, my hard disk stopped spinning at 100% after I changed the power options and turned off the hard disk after more than 3 hours. Depending on how long your computer stays idle, you could try to make it 60 minutes.

My simple thought was that the hard disk spins because the computer has limited RAM. Even when there were huge files in the process list, it still worked. When the power option of the hard disk stopping before the page file jobs are done, there's a huge process queued up in the RAM. When the hard disk becomes active again, the hard disk has a lot of page file jobs to do.

Solution 2

It took me WEEKS to find out a solution. Hope is the same for you:

When the disc is working at 100% and Windows barely responds, try to disable wifi via fn key (if you're using a laptop) and check if it gets better. If it does, I reccomend you uninstalling the Bluetooth/WLAND driver and try again.

I made a clean Windows 8 install after weeks trying to solve it. But it started again just after I install the driver, and solved when I uninstalled it. I wish I knew that before having to spend a entire day installing and configuring my laptop again.

Comments

[Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007]

Your picture would be (a lot) more useful if you sorted by Disk usage instead of by name, so that we could actually see things using the disk in the screen shot. :) Have you tried in Safe Mode? Have you done Disk Checks? Have you tried disabling start up programs?

[ganesh]

The most common reason for a disk to be busy but not transferring data is read errors. That should show up on the S.M.A.R.T. values under reallocated or pending. Can you add those values to the post? (If you need help figuring out how to do that, look at these posts tagged smart here on Super User.

[Rik]

Seems to be an epidemic with Windows 8. See here and here for possible duplicates (and solutions).

[Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007]

possible duplicate of Extremely high disk activity without any real usage, Windows 8 hard disk usage 100%

[Ramhound]

@Rik - In both of those examples it appears like a hardware not software problem.

[Rik]

@Ramhound Nope, in the second post i mentioned there was a problem with Windows 8 (re-)generating 4x 2Gb icon-files on startup which would take some time. So the OP could check if he also has these massive files.

[Ramhound]

@Rik - I have been using Windows 8.1 since it was released to MSDN users and I have not had a problem. Its not clear from that post what is generating those icons. I wouldn't say its an "epidemic" at this point.