How to get XP Pro to remember disk structure?

[Larry]

I've got 3 large hard drives plugged into a really fast AMD Athelon 64 box
under XP Pro SP2 autoupdated constantly.

At first, I just ignored it just buzzing the hard drives like crazy when I
opened Windows Explorer or 2Explorer or any other program that had to have
the basic, no-more-than-two-layers-deep folder structure, which is really
simple because I'm simple. But, here lately, it is becoming a 2 minute
exercise in hard drive madness every time any kind of window pops up to
list which folder I need to select to do anything! It's gotta be awfully
hard on the drive mechanics to have to keep buzzing away positioning the
heads, ad nauseum, just because XP Pro demands it read every file to see
what folder those files are in.

I've turned indexing on....no change. I've turned indexing off....that
doesn't help either. AS more files go on the drives, the madness keeps
getting longer and longer, even though the file folder structure hasn't
changed but one folder in MONTHS!

Is this something about NTFS? Win98SE didn't do this on my old box, even
with thousands of files on its smaller drives. Have I got something set
wrong, defaulted from M$?

How do I force Win XP Pro to CACHE my simple folder structure so it doesn't
have to poll every file on every disk surface every time it wants me to
select where to put something or to open a simple folder?

Registry changes I can make...

Thanks for the help...
This is crazy....

 

[JS]

Is the noise the same on all three drives?
If its only one drive then that drive could be going bad.

JS

 

[Larry]

Is the noise the same on all three drives?
If its only one drive then that drive could be going bad.

I have 3 drives, all just fine....they all do the same thing. Expand C: or
G: or H: to see the folders and off it goes on this wild goose chase to
look at all the files. There's never any kind of error....it's just
reading what it should already know!


Larry

 

[JS]

See if this helps:
http://www.gw2k.co.uk/Windows-Guides/Dont-Cache-Thumbnails-XP.php
From Kelly's Korner: http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_tweaks.htm
(see Item 2 in the left hand column: Increase Folder View Size Limit)

JS

 

[Larry]

http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_tweaks.htm

Thanks, I'll try it, but there's downloading going on right now and I'm
sure I'll have to reboot to make the registry change take effect.....later.

Larry

 

[JS]

You might also check that the disks are running in DMA mode and not PIO
mode.

JS

 

[Larry]

Thanks, I'll try it, but there's downloading going on right now and
I'm sure I'll have to reboot to make the registry change take
effect.....later.

I also just noticed that when you open a hard drive structure with Windows
Explorer, there are all + signs in front of all the folders that disappear
as the grinding on the drive continues, as if it's looking for something
that isn't there. The + signs disappear in a particular sequence, not in
order, as time goes by.

 

[Larry]

You might also check that the disks are running in DMA mode and not PIO
mode.

They all are.

The previous modifications in the thread didn't help, I'm sorry to say. It
just goes on, ad nauseum, looking through every file on any drive tree you
open. In Windows Explorer, the tree opens so that must be stored,
somewhere, but every directory has a + sign until the OS goes through all
the files, deleting the + sign when it finds my simpleton file structure
has no subdirectories under the directory, after satisfying its curiosity.
I just can't stop it from doing this massive search every time the tree
opens, whether opening the tree in Explorer, or it opening in a picklist in
any other program. The wild goose chase repeats, oddly with a few
exceptions that seem random....

Thank all of you for your help. See my new thread on the new IE and WinRAR
duking it out fighting for control of zip files...the looping causing me to
have to force a power-off hard reset as it's so busy looping it never reads
the keyboard. (The cure is to open WinRAR and uncheck ZIP then REcheck ZIP
in WinRAR's OPTIONS-SETTINGS-INTEGRATION, making WinRAR, once again, the
default unzip program.....not the damned IE7 browser-hijacker. How awful.


Larry

 

[JS]

Did you build the PC yourself? If so you want to check to see if there are
updated drivers for your Motherboard.
Two other tools worth looking at:
HD Tune, provides drive info and has an option to test your drive.
http://www.hdtune.com/

Belarc Advisor: http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html
It does a good job providing a wealth of information.

JS

 

[Larry]

HD Tune, provides drive info and has an option to test your drive.
http://www.hdtune.com/

Healthy and normal, no errors on the long test. Around 50-55MB/sec and
15ms seek times, dropping as it got towards the outer surface, of course.


Transfer Rate Minimum : 29.6 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 61.8 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 54.6 MB/sec
Access Time : 16.3 ms
Burst Rate : 68.8 MB/sec
CPU Usage : 10.9%

About normal for a cheap 7200 RPM drive.

HD Tune: ST3400632A Information

Firmware version : 3.04
Serial number : xxxxxxx
Capacity : 372.6 GB (~400.1 GB)
Buffer size : 16384 KB
Standard : ATA/ATAPI-7
Supported mode : UDMA Mode 5 (Ultra ATA/100)
Current mode : UDMA Mode 5 (Ultra ATA/100)

S.M.A.R.T : yes
48-bit Address : yes
Read Look-Ahead : yes
Write Cache : yes
Host Protected Area : yes
Device Configuration Overlay : yes
Automatic Acoustic Management: no
Power Management : yes
Advanced Power Management : no
Power-up in Standby : no
Security Mode : yes
Firmware Upgradable : yes

Partition : 1
Drive letter : G:\
Label : MASTER DATA HARD DRIVE
Capacity : 381551 MB
Usage : 92.54%
Type : NTFS
Bootable : No

This is the drive with the most files on it and the longest grinding time
XP does looking at all its files.

Larry

 

[JS]

See if you can find a specific system process that's taking a lot of (there
are lot of sub-processes tied to the 'System' process) the CPU resources and
slowing down your PCs drive access.

To do this try Process Explorer:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/SystemInformation/ProcessExplorer.mspx

Once you have Process Explorer installed and running:
In the taskbar select View and check 'Show Process Tree' and 'Show Lower
Pane' options.
(This will provide the detailed info you need)
Next click on the CPU column to sort processes by %CPU usage.
Then click on and expand the 'System' process and identify the sub-process
that's using most or all the CPU %.
Click on and Highlight the sub-process of interest, right click and from the
options listed select: google, This should display what out there on the web
about that process.

Note: some entries like Explorer, System process and svchost may need to be
expanded to show the detail, (sub processes), in this case click on the +
located to the left on the entry.

JS

 

[Larry]

http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html

Belarc likes my system, but says there are three security updates that
haven't been accomplished and IE7's Windows Update doesn't find anything,
only 3 driver updates for video, modem I don't use and my little Samsung
ML-2010 laser printer. I guess the 3 security updates haven't made it from
the database Belarc looks at to the Windows Update scripts, yet.

Everything is healthy and working just fine according to both Belarc and
the disk tester.... Thanks for the great pointers to these programs. It's
very interesting what Belarc has listed. Too bad Microsoft doesn't see fit
to include software like these with the product, you have to find on your
own.

Larry

 

[Larry]

Did you build the PC yourself? If so you want to check to see if there
are updated drivers for your Motherboard.
Two other tools worth looking at:
HD Tune, provides drive info and has an option to test your drive.
http://www.hdtune.com/

No. One is an Emachines and the other is a Gateway AMD Turion 64 notebook,
which does the same thing only much shorter because its drive is much
smaller. If I plug a large USB drive with a few thousand MP3 files into
the notebook, WinXP Pro on the notebook does the same thing, ad nauseum.
It looks through them all, even though I've got it all set to NO ACTION to
keep it from trying to hijack playing MP3s on Media Player. Nothing
loads...it just seems to need to look into every file before it decides
what the folder structure should be.....???

Larry

 

[Larry]

See if you can find a specific system process that's taking a lot of
(there are lot of sub-processes tied to the 'System' process) the CPU
resources and slowing down your PCs drive access.

I've been using PE for a long time. It found the occasional wild
Hardware Interrupts runaway problem noone seems to be able to fix.
Simply reboot XP and it disappears for hours to days, not temperature
related, not hardware overheating or going berserk, except maybe some
hardware's firmware bug causing it that resets the bug.

The disk search problem has little effect on the system's overhead, it
just brings the program you're trying to select a folder for to a halt
until WinXP finds what it's looking for and runs out of files to look at.
The rest of the system goes on fine....er, ah....as long as it doesn't
try to access a disk drive going berserk with XP looking at every file.
That slows any program to a crawl for several minutes.

PE shows no odd loading from any of the Windows files, hardware
interrupts or any kind of CPU problem. If you open WE and open a drive,
the CPU will still have 97% idle process time because the slow disk drive
access is holding up that process that's looking. Close Explorer with
PE, and the searching stops, instantly.

Larry