Slow performance in XP after connecting corrupted HD to system

[NightRiderZX2]

I knew i probably should not have done this, but my dad wanted to see
if i could recover any data off his shot hard drive. I have the
following system:

MSI K7N2 Delta L Motherboard
AMD Althon XP 2600+ 2.08 GHz Processor
1 GB Corsair DDR Memory
Maxtor 80GB HD
Ati Radeon X850 Pro 256 MB DDR 256-bit Video Card
Hard drive as primary device on primary IDE controller
CD-ROM and CD burner connected on secondary IDE controller

Everything has been fine until I attempted to recover data of my dad's
hard drive. I connected his drive as a slave to the primary IDE
controller. When I started up the machine, it took absolutely forever
to boot into regular windows. It probably took a good 10 minutes to get
there, normally taking a minute. The drive was absolutely shot after
multiple attempts to try and recover any data. Performance in Windows
was almost dead with the second hard drive in there. I remove the drive
out of the machine. Since that, the performance of my machine has not
been great. I'm seeing Windows now taking longer to boot up, my CPU
usage has increased, and my mouse movement is jitterish when loading
programs. Games run just fine, although it also takes a bit to load
them. I have ran virus scan's (found a keylogger and a trojan), freed
disk space, chkdsk, defragment on hard drive, checked and receeded
cables on motherboard, reset bios settings, all to no avail. Has anyone
had a similar problem before and able to fix it? My guess would be a
reformat of the hard drive, but i want to see if anyone has a solution
besides doing that.

 

[Dr Teeth]

I was just thinking how wonderful life was, when "NightRiderZX2"

My guess would be a
reformat of the hard drive, but i want to see if anyone has a solution
besides doing that.

I had a similar problem when moving hard drives around. My solution
may help.

Delete your swap file, reboot then re-create it.

--
Cheers,

Guy

** Stress - the condition brought about by having to
** resist the temptation to beat the living daylights
** out of someone who richly deserves it.

 

[NightRiderZX2]

thanks for the suggestion. ill try that and let you know how it went.

 

[NightRiderZX2]

one thing...

how did you delete and recreate the swap file? I know there are a
couple of ways to do it... just wanted to see how you did it as it
worked for you.

 

[Blades]

one thing...

how did you delete and recreate the swap file? I know there are a
couple of ways to do it... just wanted to see how you did it as it
worked for you.

If all you have is the WinXP CD, the best way would probably be though
the Recovery Console, although it takes some finessing to get RC to
delete the page file. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/255205/en-us Don't
worry about recreating the file; Windows will do so when it boots.

Assuming a new page file doesn't help, I suggest you follow this guy's
advice.
http://users.bigpond.net.au/ninjaduck/itserviceduck/udma_fix/#Solution

 

[NightRiderZX2]

Thanks so much for your help Blades. You pointed me into the right
direction. I found out that my disk drive was in PIO mode. I
uninstalled the Primary IDE controller from Windows and rebooted. It
installed the new IDE controller automatically, and then had to reboot
once more. After that, everything was peachy again and HD was now back
in Ultra DMA 6 mode. Thanks!