Poor HDD performace

[Zoltarc]

I have a 15 gig HDD (dunno what make and model, but its not a crappy old one) and it's really under performing.

The drive is on its own IDE channel. The OS is Win2K Pro SP2 with the UDMA66 patch and UDMA enabled on the BIOS and in Hardware Manager. It is spilt into three partitions Win98 | Win2K | Shared.
I have deleted the Win98 partitions put still no change. The Win2K partition is NTFS.

My problem is that the system seems very 'sluggish'. For example opening Control Panel the icons come on screen one by one, where as my other Win2k rigs load almost instantly.

I have enabled DMA on all channels, tired 256 megs of RAM, different cables IDE, removed the CD ROM, install several registry patches, defragged, tweaked the services, tweaked what programs load at start up but still it seems sluggish.

I ran SiSoft Sandra and the numbers were very low. I?ll get the exact figure later if needed.

Any ideas?

 

[Haribo]

for da love of god why do you have 3 partitions on a 15Gb HDD???

my proffesional opinion 😀 is to make it into a single 15Gb FAT32 drive and just have Win98 and Win2k on the same part. (install win98 first and it will sort itself out)

 

[FatMan42]

Don't mean to be pedantic, but have you defragged recently? Apologies if this is too obvious...🙂

 

[Zoltarc]

Win98 is only used for one peice of DOS software which I use to edit the binaries on my car computer, the NTFS is for Win2K and the final one is only 500meg used for crap.

And I have defragged 🙂 with Norton

 

[Zoltarc]

Anyone?

 

[kly1222]

You said you enabled udma in the bios, but what does the bios detect the drive as? UDMA 4, UDMA 2, or PIO mode 4? Post your results for sandra, or better yet, use hdtach or atto.