Slow hard drive

PowerDemon · 27 Oct 2007 at 18:20

Ive been having problems with a 160gig maxtor drive, a few weeks ago i had partition magic on and it says the drive was BAD, yet the drive still worked fine and formatted useing windows disk and it was fine for weeks.
The other day i formatted again and reinstalled windows, all was fine then i installed all the updates from windows update but when it rebooted it wouldnt reboot saying disk read error or something and it kept rebooting my PC.
So i installed windows on my 500gig hard drive and used it for a couple of days, got the 160 gig formatted and done fixmbr and fixboot on it, ran the maxtor tools and the results all passed, then i started having problems with the 500 gig too, installed a driver or something and went to reboot and it got disk read error.
I then thought ok the 160 is all sorted so ill instal windows on it again so i did and it went fine, installed windows, installed mobo drivers etc then went to reboot and it started with the errors again.
Now i have windows installed and it is running for now but when i do a bench test on HDTune its only reading at like 3-7mb rather than 70+mb it was before, and windows takes ages to load when booting.

The both hdds are only a couple of months old so it surely cant be anything wrong with them can it? maybe its a problem with my mobo developing? its only a few months old too.
Maybe a virus or something that my AV aint picking up? or maybe memory problem?
I really aint got a clue why this has started all of a sudden when my pc has been running flawlessly for so long.
I have installed vista64 a couple of times but have not had it on for long and went back to XP coz i was having gfx problems, maybe vista has killed my hdds or made them go bad?

Any ideas would be greatly appeciated.

rpstewart · 27 Oct 2007 at 18:56

Sounds like the drive might be stuck in PIO mode. Try uninstalling the HDD controller in device manager and letting Windows reinstall it.

PowerDemon · 27 Oct 2007 at 19:25

I just done a repair instalation of windowsxp on the 500 gig ...it all finished fine but when it rebooted it wouldnt go into windows it just got to the windows load screen then screen went black then rebooted pc

So back on the 160gig, done a bench test with HDTune and the result in the pic.

Every time i run the maxtor tools it passes but this keeps happening, maybe its montherboard related? could i have done something to the motherboard while running it at HT1000mhz? altho i didnt really run it long.

rpstewart · 27 Oct 2007 at 21:01

There's something not right there. Is there anything else running which would be accessing the disk while the benchmark is running?

Oh, you might want to star out the swearie before someone important sees it.

PowerDemon · 27 Oct 2007 at 21:41

no nothing else accessing the disk, its a fresh install of windows.

rpstewart · 27 Oct 2007 at 21:51

I'd try the drive in another machine to be sure but it looks like the drive's probably on the way out.

PowerDemon · 27 Oct 2007 at 22:48

Well i have been swapping back and forth from the 160 to the 500 etc but i did have the same problems on the 500 too, albeit not as bad as that of the 160.
While the speeds seem fine on the 500 there were a couple of times things just seem to wrong or files going missing on the 500 and having to reinstal windows on it too, like one time i installed windows on it, it got to a point where it said "autocheck" was missing or something like that then rebooted.
Also a couple of times i booted up and it kept resetting profiles to a "default" one for some reason it wasnt saving user profiles so i went and logged in with the Administrator one and its been fine on that one.
Altho i had a few problems with the 160 in the past, it always worked fine until now, only the past day or so its gotten as bad as this, and like i said the drives are pretty new with the 500gig being the newest.

I attempted a bit of overclocking the other day, changing a few things like the HT speed and FSB etc but didnt really leave it like that and ended up resetting everything to default....maybe this overclocking done something somewhere and its caused the hdd problems?