Need Help! "Semaphore Timeout Period"?

[Tsyr]

I recently reformated the C: partition of my hard drive (It's one large drive split into a 10 gig (C) 40 gig (D) and two 60 gig (E and F). Everything works fine except F drive. Whenever I try to access anything other than the root directory of the F drive (And even opening the root directory causes my system to hand for 10-15 seconds), I get a "Semaphore Timeout Period Has Expired" error, or something like that.

This bites doubly, because F is my primary storage hard drive.

Please help someone!

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Hmm. I don`t know where this problem comes exactly from, and I never heard this error message.
Semaphores are a concept to ensure that, if several processes try to access the same resource, they have the chance to do so without interfering with each other (like one changing the data the other just read, or one overwriting data changes the other just made and so on). It basically ensures that only one of them is currently accessing the resource. In your case, it seems to indicate that one of the processes does need to long accessing it (timeout error), and the whole action is canceled.

In your case, the resource is probably the single hard drive, and the proccesses are what tries to access them (and the partititions).

Unfortunately, I can`t tell you why. It might help to know what computer and software you use, especially:
Processor, Hard Drive, Memory, Operating System (Windows/Unix/Linux/Mac), programs that you use to access the Hard Drive / Partititons (If any special), programms you used to create the partititons.

Mustrum Ridcully

 

[Tsyr]

1 ghz P3 processor
512 ram (Cheap ass ram... no brand)
Western Digital 180 gig hard drive (Can try to get you more specifics on that in a while)
Windows XP Professional Edition
Used Partition Magic 8 to create the partitions.

Have used the same partition setup through two reformats of the C drive in the past.

 

[cybertalus]

I found one person who had a similar problem that was apparently caused by bad sectors on the disk. Running chkdsk /r seemed to fix it for them.

Hope this helps.