El Cap freeze-up problem GA-EP45-DS3L

[Solow]

I have been running my trusty old P45 / Core 2 duo Hackintosh for years without much trouble. Recently I installed 10.11 on a separate partition and got it running pretty well with the old Nvidia 8500 graphics booting from a USB installer thumbdrive. It ran well for a month or so and then began to freeze up at random. No amount of disc repairs have helped and it seemed to get worse and worse. The boot up was getting really slow as well as waiting for the drive for up to ten minutes to finish thrashing before I could use the machine. I updated my old 10.10 to 10.11 on the other partition just to see if somehow I corrupted something on the clean install. Unfortunately it too has problems with freeze-ups.

 

I can run older versions (10.9, 10.8) all day with no issues as well as Windows, Linux etc. I don't think the hardware is the problem except that both 10.11 installations are on the same hard drive. Could it be the drive? Something is wrong that's for sure. Any help is appreciated.