Harddrive Woes

[Apollyon]

Hi guys.

Recently my laptop has been running incredibly slowly. It seems the reason for this is the HDD, which is apparently running at 1mb/s uncached. I have no idea why it's suddenly started doing this -- and it was pretty sudden. I'm guessing it took a sharp jolt or something. Any troubleshooting ideas, or is the drive basically knackered?

I'm also grappling with two other drives atm: a 200 GB Maxtor ATA and a 300 GB Seagate SATA. Both have been running slowly, and one has been failing (though this may be due to faulty RAID drivers, since it only produced I/0 errors on one computer and not on the other). I've formatted both drives, one thoroughly and the other using a quick format. The drive I quick formatted doesn't seem to want to format thoroughly, probably due to bad sectors. I've tried repairing bad sectors via chkdsk, but it basically took forever -- I'll probably have to leave it on a few days at some point.

I'm using the other (200GB ATA) at the moment, but it seems to have bouts of slowness, where the system will hang for a split second every now and again if accessing data off it. This may be bad sectors too, since it only seems to happen with certain data.

Any feedback would be welcome. In the end it may just be a case of binning them and buying some new ones.

[Apollyon]

Update for those who care (heh):

Fixed the laptop. Seems WinXP simply set the HDD to PIO after 6 CRC errors.

The 200GB Maxtor HDD seems to be running fine (very quickly in fact at UDMA6)

The SATA HDD is probably just knackered, and still causes freeze-ups galore if I try to move data around on it.

[erjin999]

Oops, didnt see that. I could have told you that that would be the problem, as I had to fix a comp with just that issue. In fact, in that  case it was the bios setting the HD speed at PIO. Nothing could be dont to fix it. Bios resets and gigabyte dual bios recoveries failed.

Took out a ram stick and caused a cmos corruption, which was reset and then it was fine. Freaky.

But in the mean time I had read up on your problem many times over (last 3 weeks) as the symptoms are identical (and cause is similar).

I do care :)