MaXLine III - Very slow! :(

I was helping a friend get his build together. Specs below:

Case: Cooler Master Stacker 810.
Motherboard: Asus A8N-SLI Premium.
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 3800+ X2.
Heatsink Fan: Thermalright XP-90 and Panaflo M1A and Arctic Silver 5.
Memory: G.Skill 2 GB (1 GB x 2) PC-3200 (2-3-2-5).
Hard Drive: Maxtor MaXLine III 250 GB SATA w/ 16 MB Cache.
Video Card: eVGA 7800 GT.
Sound Card: Creative Audigy 2 ZS.
Optical Drive: NEC ND-3550A.
Power Supply: PC Power & Cooling 510W SLI.

Upon building it, I had everything sure and connected with no loose endings. Upon installation, I booted up to the motherboard's CD to make a SATA driver. I chose the first option: "sil3114 32bit sata/raid driver". After installing it via Windows XP CD boot up (F6), I proceeded to partition the Windows drive into 20 GB. Then it formatted full NTFS.

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30 minutes later, it's still formatting @ 37%.
1 hour later, it's still formatting @ 68%.

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I cancelled it. For test's sake, I did the quick format.

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That took 20 seconds!

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Then the installation of Windows XP took over "11 hours" as my friend would say.

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I tried different SATA drivers including NV's knowing they're full of problems too but no difference. I'm absolutely dumbfounded on this situation. Any reason for this at all?

Thanks.

-J.

Run the Maxtor diagnostics on the drive. They're on the UBCD, or you can download them from Maxtor.

You need to do a full format on the whole drive when you first get the drive or want to change formats, like from NTFS to FAT32 or something like that. Full formats do take awhile, even on new drives, but especially on large partitions. I just did a full NTFS format from the Windows install on a 300gb Seagate and I would say that took around an hour to finish. If you partition the hard drive into smaller chunks, say 10gb for windows, then the full format will go much quicker. I'm not sure how you were able to do a quick format if the full format wasn't done yet. But I do suspect that not finishing the full format was the reason Windows took longer to install. I still find it strange it actually did at all. What does the total capacity of the hard drive look like in windows?

SparksNelec said:

You need to do a full format on the whole drive when you first get the drive or want to change formats, like from NTFS to FAT32 or something like that. Full formats do take awhile, even on new drives, but especially on large partitions. I just did a full NTFS format from the Windows install on a 300gb Seagate and I would say that took around an hour to finish. If you partition the hard drive into smaller chunks, say 10gb for windows, then the full format will go much quicker. I'm not sure how you were able to do a quick format if the full format wasn't done yet. But I do suspect that not finishing the full format was the reason Windows took longer to install. I still find it strange it actually did at all. What does the total capacity of the hard drive look like in windows?

Click to expand...

This message is incorrect. You can do a quick format and have things work properly without having any previous correct filesystem layout. The "quick" format is exactly the same as what happens with Linux filesystem "formats".

Run the maxtor hard drive test or DFT (drive fitness test). If you ordered that hard drive from newegg, I'll bet its defective. I've had 2 of the same hard drives in a row (1 purchased, 1 replacement from RMA that were defective out of box because they packaged it so crappy)

JJU357 said:

Run the maxtor hard drive test or DFT (drive fitness test). If you ordered that hard drive from newegg, I'll bet its defective. I've had 2 of the same hard drives in a row (1 purchased, 1 replacement from RMA that were defective out of box because they packaged it so crappy)

Click to expand...

Are we seeing a pattern here yet? At least we have another convert here.

dook43 said:

This message is incorrect. You can do a quick format and have things work properly without having any previous correct filesystem layout. The "quick" format is exactly the same as what happens with Linux filesystem "formats".

Click to expand...

Really? Well, shit. I wish I would have found that out earlier.

It's literally impossible to do anything on his computer. What's strange is that I see the CPU utilization hits 99% high when idle in Windows XP. It may be a defective one or not. Installing something very very very long.

Okay guys, I finally got the time to stay over my friend's house to troubleshoot things. I took out 1 GB to reduce chances of issues. I took the whole build outside of the case to reduce chances of any grounding or incompatibility issues. Since my friend already had Windows XP installed (with sp2) I went on testing the Windows XP environment. I installed the X2 driver from AMD and it surprisingly reduced the 99% utilization down to 25% at most (still laggy). Still laggy, I decided to do a clean installation of Windows XP. The formatting of a 20 GB partition surprisingly took only four minutes. I already had the mobo suggested SATA RAID driver installed before installing Windows XP as a note. Then onto the formatting: It started at 2:08 just now. Now it is 2:20 and Windows is still installing. It's at 11%. I find this a little shocking. However here is a symptom: The cd drive spins up then stops spinning at short intervals. I find this to be highly irregular. The "DVDPLAY.EXE" file was loading on the bottom of the screen and it has been stuck there for at least 30 seconds (not a good sign). It goes along with the cd spinning up then down to stopping. This is a symptom for those who may have had experience with this. Right now, I'm not too sure of anything at this point. I think something just may be fried. I have replaced the SATA ribbon connector for the HDD and the IDE connector for the cd drive. I do not think the HDD is at all fault, it's something more serious than the HDD. I could be wrong. I just find it impossible to run any diagnostics on it since it is the only SATA-capable computer in the house at this moment. I have no other access to SATA motherboards. Thanks for reading up, let me know. Sorry there's no enter key to space out the details. Even his laptop's keyboard's broken. -GeForceX.

JJU357 said:

Run the maxtor hard drive test or DFT (drive fitness test). If you ordered that hard drive from newegg, I'll bet its defective. I've had 2 of the same hard drives in a row (1 purchased, 1 replacement from RMA that were defective out of box because they packaged it so crappy)

Click to expand...

Actually, yeah it was from Newegg. If it turns out to be the HDD, I should test out an IDE hdd. -GeForceX.

2:42 @ 34 percent installing "rio8drv.sys" and it's stuck on that. I find that quite strange. I feel that the CD drive is actually *waiting* for the system to process the installation (may it be hdd or motherboard or cpu) that's why it stops spinning. -GeForceX.

3:10 @ 38%. Yep same issue.

Is there a reason you are running it through the Raid controller and not the built in SATA ports? You shouldn't need a driver to install windows onto an SATA drive on that motherboard.

Even still, it came out the same. Even worse, Windows set up has been trying to load for a long time now (10 min).

You need to setup your bios properly and if your a single sata then by all means turn off any raid. Secondly yes you can do a quick format the long format is low level and not needed for a re-install of a os. Also might want to check the mb's site and download and flash the mb to the latest bios and if your not good with knowing bios settings set it to defaults and continue from there. As writeing this I am thinking the problem might not be with the hd but the cd/dvd or whatever it is and the disk is scratched etc put it under hot water with soap and clean the disk then dry it off and try again.

Oddly enough I'm having this problem on my Newegg Seagate drive... Initial format was ~ 4 hours, running chkdsk right now after some windows bootup stalls and after ~ 1 hour it's only at 54%. Currently it's going up ~ 1% every 15 mins!

Thanks for the advice, Shane. I have set the BIOS to default and tried my own settings as well. I have tried to use a Windows XP Home CD and a Windows 2000 CD and that still doesn't change anything. I have used instead a back up (working condition) 7200 RPM 8 MB Cache IDE HDD and eliminated the chance of my SATA HDD being the issue. I saw it was the same exact issue! The installation is very very slow! I'm thinking it's either the motherboard or CPU. Anyone share their insight?

-J.

CDROM drive. Try that next. Or different install media if you have it. I keep an ISO around and burn it as necessary.

How could it be the optical drive when previously installed and the optical drive wasn't used and Windows lagged with 25%+ CPU utilization at all times, slowing everything down?

-J.

I don't know what the previous problems were caused by, but right now it sounds like you're having trouble getting Windows installed, and you've swapped out everything but the cdrom. You can try Prime95 and memtest to check the memory and CPU, irrespectively; download Foldix for a simple Linux distro that can run P95 and Memtest. Burn it to CD and boot from it, and it'll install to the primary master hard drive. Then run prime95 and memtest for a few hours each.

What process takes all the CPU time? It's the second tab in the Task Manager, sort by CPU % and report the top few.