Harddrive VERY slow

[gdenehy]

I did a full reinstall.
I am pretty sure it was working good for a while and this only started
happening reasonably recently.
I have installed a million programs and drivers and whatnot since, so I
cant pinpoint anything.

 

[Kerry Brown]

Have you tried rolling back the driver to an older version? If that doesn't
work my next step would be to back up all your data, remove the drive and
try a different drive. Another possible troubleshooting step is to
dissconnect all other IDE devices and cables and see what happens. Now with
only the hard drive connected try a different cable. You could also try
disconnecting everything and hook the drive up on the secondary IDE
connector. Most motherboards can be set to allow you to boot with this
configuration. If none of these work my next step would be to overwrite
track 0 and do a fresh install of Windows. If you still have no joy then the
motherboard is probably defective. The most common cause I have seen of this
problem is a bad cable, usually caused by whoever assembled the computer
folding the cable and tying it with a zap strap to make everything look
neat. The cable eventually breaks at the folds.

Kerry Brown
KDB Systems

 

[gdenehy]

Tried all that (except a fresh install - just did one so would prefer
not to have to do it again!)

 

[Kerry Brown]

Did a different drive work OK? Yes = defective hard drive, No = defective
motherboard. That is if you have gone through all the other troubleshooting
steps and eliminated bad cable, bad driver etc.

Kerry Brown
KDB Systems

 

[Alex Nichol]

Also, hard drives will always slow down so as to match the "slowest" device
on the ATA-66 cable. This is normally why the hard drive and any CD/DVD
drives are connected to two different cables. If they are on the same
cable, then the hard drive can be slowed down.

No they do not with controllers and drivers capable of supporting UDMA.
That went out when EIDE came in - years ago

 

[Alex Nichol]

Well I did not know that! Thanks!
Is that REALLY going to make it that slow tho??? There are not 80 pins
on the connectors, so how could it make it drop down to 4MB/s?

80 wires into 40 pin plugs. The intermediate wires are (shared)
additional ground to shield signals But an ATA 66 cable should already
have them

 

[Trent©]

Tried all that (except a fresh install - just did one so would prefer
not to have to do it again!)

Get a program that can by-pass the operating system...that'll check
the drive for I/O speed, etc.

You need to determine if the drive is the problem...or if the problem
is some software that you have running in the background.

What version of xp are you running? Are you sure you turned off
indexing?...system restore?...etc.

Good luck...let us know.


Have a nice one...

Trent

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