Hard drive slows down then stops - HELP!

[develop2002]

Hopefully some genius can shed light on this bizarre problem!

I have a PC with an old ASUS P2B motherboard. I recently upgraded the processor
from a P2-350 to a P3-800 using a slot adapter card (allows socket 370 CPU to work in Slot 1 motherboard). The CPU is *slightly* over-powered at 1.80 volts, but (allegedly) this is okay (I'm beginning to wonder!). Lots of people on the internet have tried this and apparently the P3-800 can be over-powered a little with no trouble.

Anyway, everything seemed fine, so I continued to use the machine and added a new 40GB HD and an NVidia GeForce graphics card. All still ok - boots into windows fine, can play games, etc.

Then I decide to reinstall windows, so I created myself a boot disk with CD drivers too, reset to DOS mode and started copying some files from my old HD to my new one, so that I could format the old hard drive and install windows on it.

20 minutes later, I headed upstairs to see how the backup was going and discover that the machine has restarted, except the CPU fan isn't spinning and the power light on the front of the machine is blinking. I rebooted and everything looked fine.

EXCEPT, I set about deleting some files on my old hard disk, which worked at first, but the hard disk became audibly slower and slower until it eventually stopped. Thinking I might have broken the hard disk, I swapped it for the new hard disk - same problem. Thinking I might have blown the CPU I swapped it back to my old P2-350 - same problem!

Now, the machine is fine for a short while, but if I start any kind of disk access (dir /s or delete *.*) the hard drive runs slower and slower and eventually stops. Everything else seems fine - CPU fan is running, I can access the hard disk, BIOS starts up fine, I can enter the BIOS setup. Weird.....

Anyone seen this before? Help much appreciated!!!!!

Sorry about the essay, but I wanted to add as many details as possible

Thanks in advance,

Simon.

 

[CitrixEngineer]

I'm getting very similar issues with one of my machines - not only did the disk slow down, but on one or two heart-stopping occasions, would not boot - telling me that there was no operating system installed;

Abit KG7-RAID, Maxtor Diamond Max 80Gb.

I got to the bottom of it by switching the disk firstly between machines, then from IDE1 to RAID IDE 1 on the KG7. The disk worked perfectly in the other machine and on the RAID channel.

I then tried another disk on IDE1, which had the same slowing down issue.

This proved beyond doubt that it was the disk controller.

If you can try somthing similar, maybe this is also what you are seeing.

I hope this helps. CitrixEngineer@yahoo.co.uk