WinXPPro on new drive is still very slow

[M Skabialka]

My WinXP Pro PC was running very slowly and a utility said it was probably
hardware, the hard drive or the cable. So I bought a new larger hard drive
with a new IDE cable. Not wanting to reinstall everything I used Ghost to
copy from one drive to the other, then took out the old drive and cable.

It boots to the new drive, runs programs OK, but is still as slow as dirt.
Does Ghost copy fragmented files into new fragments? I did a registry
backup and the copy is 136,000 KB. Is this unreasonable large? There are
only about a dozen items running in startup, like my antivirus, etc. I
ran Disk Cleanup and followed the recommendations for cleaning out my
recycle bin, temp files, etc.

One message I do not understand is about uncached speed which is 8 MB/s
(3%). "A rating of 200% means a disk is twice the performance of similar
systems, 50% means it's half the performance. Cached disk speed generally
measures the efficiency of the system's processor and memory system, not the
performance of the hard disk. Uncached speed is most affected by the
physical hard disk and the disk interface."

With a new drive and cable, what might cause such a slow uncached speed?
How can it be speeded up, assuming I have followed all of the
recommendations?

Thanks,
Mich

 

[Ghostrider]

My WinXP Pro PC was running very slowly and a utility said it was probably
hardware, the hard drive or the cable. So I bought a new larger hard drive
with a new IDE cable. Not wanting to reinstall everything I used Ghost to
copy from one drive to the other, then took out the old drive and cable.

It boots to the new drive, runs programs OK, but is still as slow as dirt.
Does Ghost copy fragmented files into new fragments? I did a registry
backup and the copy is 136,000 KB. Is this unreasonable large? There are
only about a dozen items running in startup, like my antivirus, etc. I
ran Disk Cleanup and followed the recommendations for cleaning out my
recycle bin, temp files, etc.

Ghost does a sectory-by-sector copy of the drive image. As
a result, fragmented files are copied as fragmented files.
When convenient, most users will defragment the hard drive
before cloning it.

One message I do not understand is about uncached speed which is 8 MB/s
(3%). "A rating of 200% means a disk is twice the performance of similar
systems, 50% means it's half the performance. Cached disk speed generally
measures the efficiency of the system's processor and memory system, not the
performance of the hard disk. Uncached speed is most affected by the
physical hard disk and the disk interface."

With a new drive and cable, what might cause such a slow uncached speed?
How can it be speeded up, assuming I have followed all of the
recommendations?

Open Device Manager and check the IDE controllers for the
primary (and/or) secondary IDE channel, under advanced settings,
that the transfer mode is "DMA if available". Under PIO mode,
the transfer rate is slower.

 

[JustMe]

Ghost does a sectory-by-sector copy of the drive image. As
a result, fragmented files are copied as fragmented files.
When convenient, most users will defragment the hard drive
before cloning it.

I don't believe that is exactly right. I've done many a ghost clone and
typically if you check the file fragmentation before and after a clone the
cloned drive is much less fragmented than the original.

 

[Richard Urban]

I don't believe that is exactly right. I've done many a ghost clone and
typically if you check the file fragmentation before and after a clone the
cloned drive is much less fragmented than the original.

Are you certain that you have not disabled the option to perform
sector-by-sector imaging?

--
Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
Using Windows Vista 5472
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!

 

[M Skabialka]

I didn't really check anything out of the ordinary as this is the first time
I have used ghost. I just told it to check integrity before starting. It
took about 12 hours to copy 50 GB.

I downloaded a copy of registry mechanic which fixed some errors and
requires payments before fixing others, but it hasn't speeded up much.

 

[David Vair]

12 hours is not a reasonable time for 50 gigs, I use Drive Image 7 still and do 45 gigs in just
about 45 minutes to do a backup, a restore is about the same. I go to a 2nd internal hard drive to
store my images.