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Whats wrong with my hard drive?

B

Blammo300

Senior member
I just got back from a month long trip and my main hard drive has been very slow. I have my main hard drive paritioned, 6 gigs for Windows XP and the rest for programs and such. It has been lagging whenever I use a program or file on the program partition. I tried testing the drive in the powermax program but it passed. Anyone have an idea of the cause?

Maxtor 40gig 7200rpm
MSI KT333
1.4 Tbird
512 DDR PC2100
Ati Radeon 8500LE
 
Defrag, clear your prefecth, clear your temp, check VM settings, check RAM (what's installed, what's XP see), etc..

Thorin
 
Ok I defragged and cleared out the prefetch and temp. I dont know how to check the VM settings, but I have 512 megs of ram and thats what it says. I took out each stick to test them and they both worked ok without the other. The drive is not making any wierd noises or anything.
 
Originally posted by: Blammo300
I just got back from a month long trip and my main hard drive has been very slow. I have my main hard drive paritioned, 6 gigs for Windows XP and the rest for programs and such. It has been lagging whenever I use a program or file on the program partition. I tried testing the drive in the powermax program but it passed. Anyone have an idea of the cause?
Click to expand...

Okay, this is very important. Did you use a computer when you were on your month-long trip? And if so, did it have a 15000 rpm Ultra SCSI 320 drive? If so, you could be suffering from "Cheetah HD Lag", which is when a drive seems to run slow because you were using the fastest drive on the FU**ING planet in another system.

:wine:
 
Odd.. I have been experiencing the exact same problem! I have a 30 gig drive, 8 gigs partitioned for Windows/Programs and the rest for storage. I have noticed my drive has become a lot slower for some reason. I have a decent amount of space left, and I defraged. Not sure what is up, but there is definiately some performance loss.

Edit*

Did you by chance happen to do that registry hack that makes XP boot faster? this is the only thing I can remember doing that I wasn't really sure of. I am wondering if maybe that had something to do with it
 
Have you tried deleting both partitions and formatting? I havent tried yet, but I dont want to do it if it wont help.
 
I would say the most likely culprit is too many background processes. That's what always gets me. When I do a fresh install (reformat first) the computer is blazing, but when i add zone alarm, nav, cd-rw software, wireless network software and all the drivers speed is reduced by a lot.

Maybe it's something you recently loaded?

Doing a fresh install every once in awhile is always a good idea. I have two hard drives -- 60 and 120 gb. 60 gb is divided up as such:

HD1 (60gb)
-1 partition with xp (20gb)
-6 or so partitions for linux (20gb total)
-1 partition with fat32 for backup and sharing between linux & xp (20gb)

HD2 (120gb)
-all data, NTFS, on 1 partition (120gb)
 
I already formatted the Programs partition, that didnt work so I formatted OS partition and it is still acting wierd. It only really lags when I access the programs partition. I already did all the Maxtor factory certified tests.
 
I just finished deleting the partitions and formatting the drive. I made new partitions at 10gig for C: and the rest for programs. After all that it still continues to lag in the program partiton. Though it does not lag all the time it only does it when ever I have been accessing the drive quite often, or at least I think thats what causes it.

Could this be caused by a dieing ram stick, I removed both ram sticks and tested them individually and they both worked fine.
 
I have had 2 of the Maxtor Diamond Max Plus 40G 7200rpm drives slow way down on me. The first one made me buy Spinrite since I could not pinpoint what the problem was, and it said that the 'Burst Mode' process of the drive had stopped working. I ran Maxtor's diagnostic software and it failed to finish the S.M.A.R.T. test, so they replaced it. Now, I recently had to replace the replacement drive for the same problem. For the record, I did get the full warranty value, but went WD this time around for the 3 year warranty and 8M cache. My advice is to boot to dos and run their program diagnostics.
 
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