Strange HD slowdown

[floogy]

Over the past couple of days my computer has been hanging and it seemed that the hard drive was slower, booting took much longer and just clicking on my C drive hung the system for a few seconds . I benchmarked it with SiSoft Sandra and it read a speed of 2800 KB/s when a normal ata100 7200rpm 80GB should be around 29,000 KB/s. I thought it could have been an issue with my registry because i cleaned it out but I restored all of them and it wouldn't have affected how long it takes to boot. Any ideas on why it's acting like this? I'll give any suggestions a shot.

Sys. info
Seagate Barracuda ATA 4 80GB 7200 rpm
ASUS A7V333
Athlon XP 2500+
512mb pc2700

 

[vietofmars]

Check your dma settings. Better yet do a system restore if you have it enabled.

 

[floogy]

Well i'm pretty sure it's not anything with my dma settings because i haven't touched that stuff since i built my computer. I disabled system restore some time ago so that isn't an option. In safe mode it isn't slow at all so it's not hardware. I defragged and now it seems even slower. It took 10 seconds for the icons in my windows directory to show up. I'm at even more of a loss now because i exhausted all the possibilities i had in mind.

 

[johnjkr1]

You should check your DMA settings. Just because you do not change them, does not mean they can not change. Also, you should check device manager for any ?'s or yellow !'s.

 

[floogy]

I did check them actually, should have stated that in my second post. The device manager was also another thing i checked right away. I'm thinking about running sysprep to clean the drivers etc out and see if that helps. If nothing else works it looks like a clean install for me. EDIT: Just found something out, my BIOS says it's using DMA 5 but in device manager it says the primary IDE channel is using PIO although it is set to use DMA if available. I seem to have found the issue but can only guess at how to fix it.

 

[floogy]

I FIXED IT! hooray. Thanks for your replies, they pointed me in the right direction to fix the problem. Just deleted the Primary IDE out of device manager, rebooted a couple times and presto.

 

[johnjkr1]

Good to hear!