Help please! Mobo & HD mis-matched?

[showhost]

Hi all...

Bit of a newbie to all things technical so need your help on this. I have a computer that's about six years old. Asus P2L97 mobo with 266 mhz Pentium Pro processor, running Win 98 SE. Been working fine for a long while with a very small hard drive (I'm NOT a gamer). A friend offers me a 10 gig Maxtor drive to upgrade my system. I re-format his drive and simply copy and paste entire contents of my current drive to the new one (including OS). Now the thing runs like molasses. Takes forever to boot up, to open programs, in Word, I type a line and it doesn't appear on the screen for 5 seconds -- everything is just deathly slow.

So I do a little research on my own and discover that my mobo is a UDMA/33 and the new HD is UDMA/66. Not really sure what the significance of this is, but it seems that it's a mis-match, yes?

The question: Is there anything I can do short of buying a new mobo or processor to take advantage of the new HD without a huge expense. Is this a problem that can be addressed with a new BIOS or does anyone have any other suggestions? If you need more data on my system see below. Appreciate anything anyone can offer.

The tech guy at Asus (who didn't seem very knowledgeable said it's a dead end because board will limit data transfer to 33 mhz). I told him that speed was just fine when I had the old hard drive in but now it's 15 times slower! Any ideas?

BIOS Date: 12/2/97
BIOS Type: Award Modular v4.51 PG
Chipset: Intel 440EX/LX rev3
128 mb memory

Thanks,

SHOWHOST

 

[pspada]

It sounds like you used software to allow the old system to "see" the entire hard drive as one big drive. This software slows the system considerably, especially on an old system. You are better off splitting the drive into partitions (probably 2 gig, but perhaps 8 gig) which should make the drive run as fast as possible in that system.

For reference, any UDMA 66 is backward compatible, and will just run at the slower UDMA 33 speed that the mobo supports.

 

[robcy]

Issue: You copied and pasted your OS on the new drive.

Disconnect the old drive, reformat the new drive. Install the OS on the new drive from scratch. Run old drive as a slave, and then transfer the files that you want to keep from the old drive to the new.

I have never seen a copy/paste OS work well when changing out harddrives unless a special software is used.

the 33 to 66 should not ba a problem, because the new drive will run at 33 (backward compatible)