Hard drive problem?

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
4,281
Yesterday I couldn't get XP to start, it got to the first loading screen on startup and then reset itself then it asked me to boot into safe mode etc.

I tried to get into safe mode but it kept hanging at AGP440.SYS and no matter what I did I couldn't get further than that. I went through the XP CD to try and repair it or disable AGP440 to no avail so I had to reformat the drive.

During reformatting it seemed to take ages to make any progress (1 hour in total for an 80GB HDD) and seemed very steppy - 0% for 5mins then shooting up to 3% and so on. I seem to remember it being much more smooth and steady as it progressed the last time.

Does this sound like a problem with the HDD, would it be worth buying another?

I have a P4P800 board and I don't think I can use a SATA II drive with it, what options do I have?

Thanks in advance.
 
There's an MS Knowledge Base article which seems to fit the symptoms you describe - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324764

The format does seem a little slow but I've not got much recent experience of full formats to go on, I just use the quick format option these days simply because a full one takes so long.

The P4P800 will accept a modern SATA drive. SATA II isn't a new standard it's simply a marketing term mistakenly used to describe SATA drives capable of running on a 300Mb/s interface.
 
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