Harddrive slows to a crawl randomly on startups, please help!!!

[quique]

Hello all, thank you for taking the time to read this! I have an older model computer with Tekram motherboard P6L40-A4E. It's a Celeron 266 and it has two hard drives, both are Seagate one is 10 GB and the other is 4 GB.

The problem occurs randomly. When I startup the computer it boots up to the Windows 98 startup screen and then shortly afterwards I can hear rhythmic regular harddisk noises. If I wait long enough Windows 98 will boot up but will also be extremely slow. Sometimes I get a bluescreen when this happens.

The weird thing is that this occurs randomly. Sometimes the computer boots up perfectly and other times it crawls like how I just described. I looked up the mobo website and saw updates to BIOS and things but none of the symptoms matched my problem.

Does anyone have any suggestions??? I would greatly appreciate them!!! Thank you.

 

[Magic30]

Are you sure that your HD(s) are physically all right? Run Scandisk or Norton Dics Doctor to check this.

 

[quique]

I ran scandisk and it said it was ok...do you think it's a physical hard disk problem?

 

[Magic30]

It can also be a virus, which slows down your system... I would check that first.

 

[Shagga]

Have u got task scheduler running in the background?

 

[quique]

I think I formatted the drive like four times already. The hard drive crawled and gave me that rhythmic noise when I was in the middle of installing Win98. It was booting up to that "Preparing to start Win98 for the first time" and I had to reboot again. Luckily it recovered ok.

I've been using that same Win98 CD with all my computers and this problem never occured there. The task manager was also inactive. Puzzling...and suggestions?

Thank you

 

[quique]

I don't think there's a virus cause it happens on a freshly installed system.