HD access is SOOOOOOO slow ...

[rgstewart]

Something has happened to my HD within the last couple of days - I switched it on the other day, and it was taking AGES to boot up ... each time I started it after that it only got worse. Eventually I did a scandisk, which upon completion (8 hours to scan 8Gbs) told me the disk had 33 corrupt clusters, but had been able to fix the problems. I decided if 33 clusters went OVERNIGHT I'd be better binning the drive and starting with a new one ... little did I know it wasn't anything to do with the hard drive, really.

I have formatted a new drive, and am trying to install Windows on it, but it is taking FOREVER!! It scans the disk to make sure that's all right, then it just sits at a black screen with the text 'Copying files needed for Windows Setup ...'

I have restarted a couple of times and checked the contents of the clean C drive - it IS actually copying the files ... just really, REALLY slowly.

Does anyone know what other things might be causing the problem here? Could it be the cables, or the HD controllers on the motherboard? I haven't a notion, so any help would be REALLY apprectiated!

 

[PredAlien]

Have you tried reinstalling the chipset drivers for the motherboard?
If you have onboard drive controllers and have reinstalled windows, it might help to reinstall the chipset drivers.
If you don't have a PCI drive controller card, the chipset drivers control the harddrives.

PredAlien

 

[cdogg]

Kesser,
It was already explained that the original main drive was removed, while the slave drive was formatted and left connected.

PredAlien,
Installing chipset drivers is the step you take AFTER you get Windows installed. Remember, the problem occurs even when starting with a freshly formatted drive. Also remember that the problem didn't exist at one point.

rgstewart,
It appears from those specs in the BIOS that you have an 8GB drive which uses ATA/33 (DMA Mode 2). That's not that fast by today's standards, but the installation process shouldn't get hung up for very long like you've described.

What version of Windows are you trying to install?

For the heck of it, I would delete all partitions on this drive using a Win98 startup disk (

http://www.bootdisk.com)

and going into FDISK. If you're trying to install 98 or ME, then go ahead and setup a new FAT32 formatted partition. If you are trying to install XP, then boot into the WinXP setup utility using the CDROM as a boot device and reformat the drive in NTFS.


~cdogg
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[rgstewart]

Already tried all that cdogg. When I took the original HD out I had to repartition the secondary HD so that I could have a Windows drive and what I call a 'data' drive (so that when - not IF, you'll notice! - when Windows screws itself over I can reformat the Windows drive without wiping all my files). I used the EBD from Windows, fdisk'ed to set up a primary DOS partition and an etended DOS logical partition, formatted the Windows partition and tried installing on it. Again, no luck. After that, I tried wiping ALL the partitions, and making one primary active partition of the whole HD. STILL no luck.

I'm no expert in these matters, but it seems to me there has been some damage to the mobo ... perhaps the HD controller? Scandisk checks the HD for errors pretty fast (20 seconds) in the first part of the Windows setup (it's ME, BTW), so there must be some sort of control left. It's just when files need to be written to the HD it takes FOREVER.

Thanks again for all your help ... is there anything else I can try before I start thinking about buying a new mobo, processor, RAM, HD(judging by your description of my 'anitquated' drive!) etc. ... ?