Hard disk becoming very-very slow suddenly

ntg

ntg

ntg

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24 Nov 2008
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Alright, here is my problem,


I have two hard disks, 1TB Spinpoint F1s. One of them has been partitioned in three parts.

C: for the OS (WinXP)
E: for entertainment stuff, and
W: for work related stuff/ academic stuff and personal data

While doing some file copying/extracting on E: I noticed that the computer was very-very slow. I thought it might have been some programme or anything else so I rebooted. It took ages to boot up and then WinXP were very slow. I got worried about the disk dying so I setup a disk check after the next reboot and left it during the night. In the morning it had checked all partitions (the other 1TB included which was quite full) and it was working on the last partition, E:. I waited for a couple of hours and it only moved from 3% to 4%. I had to restart.

So I get back into winxp, everything is slow, can't figure out what's going on. I tried using the Samsung diagnostic but for some reason it can't load the cd-rom drivers on booting so I can't use it.

I am lucky to have a Win7 install on a separate old ide disk, so I booted up from there. When I access the E/W/C drives through Win7 everything works fast and well. I run an HDTune on the hard drive in question and came back clean without any errors. I now left the pc to run a disk check and correct any bad sectors on the drive through Win7.

Any ideas what might be causing this? Could it be a software issue? I haven't installed anything recently to justify a change of performance..Actually nothing has been installed during the past week and I only got the problem on Monday.

what could it be?
 
Last edited:
While doing some file copying/extracting on E:
Click to expand...

This was your original problem. Obviously if you're using the drive for something intensive like that, everything else is going to go dog slow.
 
No, you misunderstood me.

I noticed that the system was very slow judging by the speed of copying. I wasn't doing anything else and it seemed extremely slow. When I rebooted everything behaved very slow to respond - without any copying/file-manipulation taking place. It felt as if the disk is dying (had it happen before and had exactly the same behaviour until it started throwing errors around all the time).
 
Oh 'k. Not sure then, as HDTune is fine from another disk, try running it while booting on the 'dodgy' disk maybe?
 
Ok, I'll be running HDTach on it to see what comes back.

One question though, suppose I find bad sectors on the disk or any significant problem on it that causes it to underperform. Would it be feasible to RMA it based on that issue alone, or does it have to break down before I am eligible for a replacement?
 
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