Hard Drive Failing

[sussertown]

I have a second hard drive on an XP machine. I found that the spyware cleaners were slowing and even freezing on the 2nd drive. Even defrag took a couple of hours and if I tried to stop any of this the system slowed and froze. I have the ide drive on an SAT adapter. I did the Windows error checking. Is there anything else that would cause the drive to act like this, other then it is breaking down? Haven't lost any data on it so far. Data and backups seem to be working fine.

 

[Denithor]

Make sure your drive hasn't dropped into PIO mode.

Go to Device Manager, find the IDE adapter and look for status of each controller. Should all be in DMA mode.

 

[sussertown]

Thank you. I think I found the problem. I believe one of the ports is bad and plugging the drive into another port seems to have change it's behavior in defragging. I'm assuming all is well now.

 

[Denithor]

Sweet. Easy fix, and cheaper than buying a new hdd.