hard driver slow down

[john3721]

Hello Every one,

I have a 30G Hard Disk. I ran well 2 days ago. However it become slow down now.

It took me more than 4 hours to format a 8G logic driver. 5 hours to install Windows XP pro in PIII 866 CPU and 256m Ram. Before all the process took me about 1.5 hours.

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated. Thanks.

 

[Cherubimon_3.20]

the prob could be some errors on the drive or a couple of bad sectors

 

[Lostman]

Is it a Maxtor drive? (been hearing bad things about them lately)

Have you run scandisk on it? How old is the drive?

Are you using a regular IDE cable? (flat and long, connects your h/d to the mobo) How old is that? Cables can go bad. And when they do, they make data transfer a bitch.

 

[john3721]

Thanks. The hard disk is Maxtor. 2 ys old. You are right, it has some bad sections.

 

[ekÆsine]

back up your data fast! when you start getting bad sectors that could mean the hard disk is failing.

there is a dos command to repair bad sectors, i think its scandisk, i can't remember. otherwise you can repair it through your windows operating system by right clicking the drive and selecting properties. there should be a feature to repair it.

and again backup that data immediately just in case!!

 

[hustbaer]

when you are getting bad sectors your harddisk IS already dead.
sorry man.

modern drives have dedicated areas (cylinders) where they store data of "bad" blocks.
means when the disk needs more than X (some hardcoded value) retries to read the data of one block, it "maps" the data to the reserved space.
the chances for a block to fail immediately and completely, so that the disk cannot read it at all are minimal.

if scandisk or any similar program reports bad sectors, it usually means that the reserved space for mapping bad sectors is full, or the disk has gone SO bad, that it cannot read the data anymore, even after some 100 retries.

so, if your drive shows only 1 damn bad block, replace it immediately!

bye,
--hustbaer