• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Computer much slower...harddrive growing louder?

H

Hadoken

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 25, 2005
Messages
137
First off, 3 people use this computer, I'm constantly cleaning off spyware that seems to appear when some people are left in the house alone if you know what I'm saying.
The computer (Athlon XP 2400, WinXP Home reformatted 2-3 months ago, 1gb of RAM, 120gb Western Digital Caviar) started going much much slower, so I thought well it must just be another battle with spyware. I ran AdAware, Microsoft Antispyware, and AVG and AdAware found some, but it didn't seem to be anything major, just some possibly dangerous cookies but nothing I deemed to be that dangerous. Cleared that off, and restarted and my computer that normally loads windows in 8-12 seconds, took atleast 60 seconds. It actually seemed to speed up a little later, then slowed down again.
Now 2 days later, I come home and Microsoft Antispyware is running and my normally quiet harddrive is clacking and clicking searching for data like a old Pentium 2 machine I would keep in the closet.
I'm guessing the only thing that would make a harddrive get louder is breaking down and wearing out? And that would affect my boot up speeds and other speeds. Is there anything else I should check or any tests I can do on my harddrive?
 
Try defragging (start>all programs>accessories>system tools>disk defragmenter) :)
 
I'm doing that now on my operating system partition and it's taking forever. Much longer than the last time I did it.
I ran the full system test on PCPitStop.com and it said this about my hard drives:
Accessed uncached data at 2mb/s for the OS partitioin and 3mb/s for the 2nd partition compared to a average of 34mb/s for comparable computers.
After the defrag I'm going to try again.
 
Finished the defrag on the OS partition and re-ran the pcpitstop tests and these are my results for disk health.


TIP > Unusually low disk performance
Drive C has an uncached speed of 3 megabytes per second.

Drive D has an uncached speed of 3 megabytes per second.

For comparison, systems with the same CPU and clock speed as this one have a speed of 34.31 MB/s.

I ran WD's Diagnostics and it says "SMART status FAIL!" and when I click on that it gives me a list of things with green checks and one RED X saying
"Raw Read Error Rate" ID: 1 Value: 15 Threshold: 51 Worst: 1 Warranty: 1

If I try running the QUICKTEST it says "Quicktest on drive 1 did not complete!
Status Code=04 (unknown failed test element), failure checkpoint=64 (SMART attribute test) SMART self test did not complete on drive 1!

I have no idea what any of that means but I'm sure it isn't good...can anyone fill me in?

EDIT I changed IDE cables and same deal, at the same time I changed I used some canned air and blew out the connections etc on the harddrive and now the loud access noise is gone, but it's still slowwwwww.....
 
With this HDD making suspicious noises and showing severely reduced performance, I'd say that it's on its way to a premature end to its corporeal existence. Back up any important data and get a replacement drive.
 
Is there any easy way to transfer all of my stuff on my second partition (NON-OS partition) over to the new hard drive, but then do a clean install of WindowsXP?
 
SMART error = RMA time.

If you use WD's Advance Replacement, you'll have 30 days from when the replacement is shipped out to play with both drives and get the bad one shipped back to WD. This is highly recommended - you get the new drive in less than a week and you get approved packaging to send the bad one back in.

You should be able to use Ghost, or simply drag and drop the files in Windows. When you install Windows on the new drive, have the old one diconnected, so as to prevent you from accidentally reformatting it. After you get to desktop with the new drive, reconnect the old one, proceed to copy files off of the old one. With a drive that is having errors, you will want to verify that the backup you make is not corrupt. Good Luck!
 
Hadoken said:
Is there any easy way to transfer all of my stuff on my second partition (NON-OS partition) over to the new hard drive, but then do a clean install of WindowsXP?
Click to expand...
There are two ways to do this:

- install new HDD, take out old one. Install Windows and install the old HDD again. Copy the data from the old HDD to the new HDD.

- install new HDD, partition and format it, then copy data from the old HDD to the new one. Once you're done, pull out the old HDD and install Windows on the OS partition of the new HDD.

You'll want to choose an approach which causes the old HDD to spin up/down and be active as little as possible, as it could die any moment.
 
DougLite said:
SMART error = RMA time.

If you use WD's Advance Replacement, you'll have 30 days from when the replacement is shipped out to play with both drives and get the bad one shipped back to WD. This is highly recommended - you get the new drive in less than a week and you get approved packaging to send the bad one back in.

You should be able to use Ghost, or simply drag and drop the files in Windows. When you install Windows on the new drive, have the old one diconnected, so as to prevent you from accidentally reformatting it. After you get to desktop with the new drive, reconnect the old one, proceed to copy files off of the old one. With a drive that is having errors, you will want to verify that the backup you make is not corrupt. Good Luck!
Click to expand...

Is WD's replacement just if it is under warranty? My 3 year warranty expired 2 weeks ago :rolleyes: !
 
You're hosed dude. Sorry. Head to Disk Storage Systems and read the [thread=873523]Buyer's Guide[/thread] if you're interested in getting a drive from a different maker. WD isn't the only desktop drive maker you know. All of the makers have good drives (and bad ones), and each maker has a really compelling drive for different goals and usage models.
 
Hadoken said:
Man it's really weird...bootup is always slow but it actually seems to have sped up slightly in the past 24 hours...Is it possible for a hard drive to be going and fluctuate in performance so much? I still think it's the hard drive but I didn't know they were so fickle when they started breaking.
Click to expand...
HDDs are mechanical devices, so they do not always degrade in a linear fashion.

Are there any Yea's or Nea's about this one? http://www.circuitcity.com/ssm/Seag...sem/rpsm/oid/118283/rpem/ccd/productDetail.do
Click to expand...
Seagate is a good brand, just like Samsung and Hitachi.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top