hard drive problems

[george2002]

As some of you have been reading I am working on the computer from hell.
It has been a real challenge. The system has two hard drives and a
Maxtor backup drive. I finally got the system running, in large part due
to the help from this group, by using the second hard drive as the
primary drive and reinstalling the system on that drive. I then backed
up the fresh copy of XP on the Maxtor. Then I switched the hard drive
back and tried to install a fresh copy of XP on that drive (I had a
reason for doing that that I can't remember right now). Well, in the
newly flashed BIOS (it worked perfectly on the other drive) move in slow
motion. It took a long time to find the IDE drive and even after that
moved slowly. Now I am wondering whether the REAL problem was that old
primary hard drive in the first place. When I hook in the other drive
the system runs through the BIOS in a flash. I don't know that I have
explain this well enough but does it sound like the hard drive might be
the problem? It works well when configured as the slave drive . . . I
don't know what to think.

Thank you again, George

 

[Malke]

As some of you have been reading I am working on the computer from
hell.
It has been a real challenge. The system has two hard drives and a
Maxtor backup drive. I finally got the system running, in large part
due to the help from this group, by using the second hard drive as the
primary drive and reinstalling the system on that drive. I then backed
up the fresh copy of XP on the Maxtor. Then I switched the hard drive
back and tried to install a fresh copy of XP on that drive (I had a
reason for doing that that I can't remember right now). Well, in the
newly flashed BIOS (it worked perfectly on the other drive) move in
slow motion. It took a long time to find the IDE drive and even after
that moved slowly. Now I am wondering whether the REAL problem was
that old primary hard drive in the first place. When I hook in the
other drive the system runs through the BIOS in a flash. I don't know
that I have explain this well enough but does it sound like the hard
drive might be the problem? It works well when configured as the slave
drive . . . I don't know what to think.

Thank you again, George

You've done a great job of troubleshooting. If you want to be sure of
your diagnosis, you can always run a diagnostic utility from the drive
mftr.'s website. Download the file and make either a bootable floppy or
cd with it. Boot with it and do a thorough test on the drive.

But if it were me, I wouldn't bother unless this was a new expensive
drive I needed to return for a refund. If it is an older drive, just
toss it and move on.

Malke