Everything is slow and going to PIO for me

edited September 2007 in Hardware
Just reinstalled Windows XP Professional.
I have two drives in my machine a 320GB Western Digital and a 160GB Seagate, I unplugged my external storage which has increased dramatically from my signature.

I first noticed something was not right after talking on teamspeak and playing a few videogames or editing video. I have barely reinstalled most of my applications. I will get a scratchy sound coming from my headphones, Windows XP Professional will take over 30 seconds to load. With my previous installation with everything installed loading Windows XP (Boot screen, login, and work) took was 30 seconds to a minute.

So I tried unplugging the Seagate drive that has Windows on it but it appears to have installed onto my WD drive as I get a Grub Boot load error from when I had Linux installed on the drive a long time ago. So I had to put the WD drive back in. After installing and reinstalling drivers and seeing the processor usage skyrocket, but not showing up in the processes I used process explorer and noticed the kernel usage was extremely high and made up for the usage I was not seeing in the taskmanager.

I am unable to boot into safe mode and my other installations never finish the repair installs (Stuck at 39 or 34 minutes)

The reason for my reinstall is because my previous Windows installation was slowing down and grinding to a halt.

I have installed the intel chipset 915G accelerator
I have to IDE locations in the device manager:
IDE Primary (Runs in PIO)
IDE Primary (Runs in Ultra DMA)

I have tried multiple registry tweaks
(Remove Checksums, manual change DMA modes, timings, reset time check to 1, etc.)
but it keeps reverting back to PIO, I have tried Uninstalling the IDE Primary's then restarting and waiting for it to detect, which it does but is defaulted to PIO for the first IDE Primary.

I have tried swapping SATA connectors, etc. I have partition magic installed and it tells me it's a bad disk and does not show any partitions, but I can use Acronis and see all partitions, run chkdsk and have no problems using all the options /V, /R, /V /R /F, etc. I even ran scandisk from dos without seeing any problems for the Western Digital Drive.
Partition Layout (In Order of partitions)
Western Digital:
C:Operating System - Old Windows XP Installation
F:Document Storage
G:Data Storage/Apps, Videogames, Projects, etc.

Seagate:
H:Gametap Storage, Webapps
D:New Windows Installation

My Boot Options*
Windows XP Professional - New installation on Seagate Drive
Windows XP Professional - Attempted Repair Installation on WD
Windows XP Professional - Attempted Repair Installation on WD
*All appear to be stored onto the Western Digital Drive

Thank you for your help again Icrontic

Comments

  • kryystkryyst Ontario, Canada
    edited September 2007
    to get rid of grub you need to boot up with a windows xp cd and go into a recovery console then do fixmbr that will get rid of grub.

    As for the rest. Your issues could all be the result of a partial install of windows with another windows over top of it. I'd suggest wiping your system and doing a fresh clean install.
  • Ultra-NexusUltra-Nexus Buenos Aires, ARG
    edited September 2007
    To remove Linux´s GRUB, just boot from a D.O.S. floppy and do a FDISK /MBR

    Just make sure the partition where you store your Windows is bootable, again with FDISK you can do this.

    For the PIO issue, if you force it in Windows to UDMA and it reverses back to PIO, then its a BIOS issue. You should check that its all set to AUTO in BIOS.

    Also if your drives are IDE, check that you are using a 80pin ribbon cable and that the midle connector is attached to the SLAVE drive and the last connector to the MASTER drive (be it a optical drive o an HDD).
  • edited September 2007
    I have no settings in my BIOS to change the mode type unfortunately Phoenix BIOS A09 - Dell
  • edited September 2007
    Alright seems that my WD320 drive was causing everything to go into PIO mode, I disabled the drive in the BIOS, reinstalled a fresh installation onto the Seagate, and it is running in Ultra DMA 5 mode. Bootime 10 to 20 seconds to load screen

    I have Acronis, and just wondering if you guys know if Acronis copies bad sectors, etc. or will it copy only the good sectors so I can reformat the WD320 and put the imaged data back onto the drive.
  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited September 2007
    It copies everything, bad sectors included.
  • edited September 2007
    mmm, know of a way I can repair this, as the whole disc does not show up for Windows but appears for Partition Magic (Bad Disk) and Acronis with no problems.

    Also since I have Windows Working fine on my Seagate is it fine to remove the boot.ini from the other drive?
  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited September 2007
    You can try a chkdsk /r at the recovery console for Windows. But if the disk is bad, the disk is bad.
  • edited September 2007
    I think the disc may be bad, but thankfully the data is readable, so I'll do a backup and RMA the WD320 Internal along with my other 500GB External WD MyBook drive as the external when plugged in either causes MFT errors, and puts a drive in PIO mode, or the WD320 Goes into PIO Mode and hal.dll always get's corrupted and repair installs fail on the drive.

    I'll then use Acronis to mount an image when I get the drives back and transfer the data files over to the new drives.

    Also I have SMART on for the drives, but apparently there was some sort of corruption for my External MyBook drive, and in the future I would like to reduce the chances of this happening again. As PIO is just horrible and makes working a living nightmare, as I ran chkdsk but it always failed, then I formatted and no problems showed up, so I left the drive on with nothing on it and I saw a delayed read error along with a corruption of the MFT warning in XP.
  • Ultra-NexusUltra-Nexus Buenos Aires, ARG
    edited September 2007
    Try the HDD Regenerator 1.51 utility.... it works really great in restoring an HDD drive and its contents.
  • edited September 2007
    I used Acronis to backup the readable partitions (Not viewable in Windows Explorer) and I mounted the images, and I am transfering the files back to the drive.

    I formatted the drive (WD320GB and MyBook 500GB)
    I ran Spinrite on the drives and the drives are AOK.

    Thank you for your help guys I really appreciated it :D
Sign In or Register to comment.