[mcmmotorsports]

Would a bad HD cause a computer to run slow? My wifes is really messing up. I re-formatted the HD last night and installed a fresh copy of ME and it is still really slow.

 

[CaseyGT2001]

if the hard drive was freshly formated, then it shouldn't be the sorce of the slow down. Unless of course it has some bad sectors.. run chkdsk from a command promt...

Also.. do yourself a favor, and shatter your ME disk....
find a copy of win2k or xp...

 

[04 elantra cvvt]

Also, ditch ME. IF you bought the comp. new, and it came with ME, call microsoft, they'll give you a free upgrade to XP. There were many problems with ME. And, as Casey said, if some of the sectors are bad, nothing will speed it back up.

 

[Keyan]

A harddrive is a disk, and it spins to read data, just like a CD drive would.
If the harddrive becomes unbalanced and spins slower, data read would become slower as would the entire computer's ability to do anything (because outside of RAM, all i computer does is read/write data)
My mom's laptop was in a car accident before she bought it. She didn't know how badly the harddrive was off-balanced, and after she bought it he found out it processed everything extremely slow...(at an efficency of TWO PERCENT!)
If you want to know if your harddrive is the cause of your problems, go to www.pcpitstop.com and run all of the self tests. Your harddrive speed is in the summary report, along with many other things to help you find the soure of your problem.

 

[tharptroy]

windows ME is trash

 

[mcmmotorsports]

When I took out her hard drive to re-format it, it was very, very hot. Hotter than I think it should be. Mine wasn't even that hot. Anywho, I went to pcpitstop.com and the testing went fine until it got to a uncached test of drive c: it then stopped testing and I had to restart her computer, which by the way, takes over 20 minutes to do.

 

[04 elantra cvvt]

Ditch ME and go with XP, or even 98 is better.

 

[jameswing]

How big is the drive? how much info did you put back on it? Also How much RAM do you have and what is your processor speed? Was it working better then just all of a sudden slowed down?

 

[felixr]

oh and dont forget to take your ME cd and piss on it as you burn it in a fire , oh and of course remember to take a sledgehammer to your ME cd . . . uhm . . . lets see . . OH YEAH! before i forget throw away your ME cd too!

 

[mcmmotorsports]

Ok, through process of elimination, I concluded that the HD is fried.
I bought a replacement on eBay:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5107073800&ssPageName=STRK:MEWN:IT

Installed fresh copy of O/S (version omitted to prevent flaming) :tongue:
Just for sh1tz and giggles I look at the drive size. It has only recognized 2.0 GB
So I go up to Maxtors site, they talk all this crap about Jumper settings and some CLJ crap. Why the hell would you want to limit a HD to something less than what it is? Anywho, how do I need to set this up and now RE-FORMAT it so it reads a full 10 GB?

 

[Schauf]

Many drives come with an option of setting jumpers to limit the size of the drive because of limitations of older computers. Today the limit for many slightly older computers is about 137GB because they do not support 48bit Logical Block Addressing (LBA). Today, a computer without 48bit LBA will only see a 200GB hard drive up until it hits that 137GB region and just thinks the drive ends there. But when older computers hit limits like this years ago, they probably would not see the drive at all. So the drives could make themselves look like a 2GB drive, or whatever else, using jumpers.

Although jumper setting vary from company to company and model to model, you will probably want to remove all jumpers and just put one back on to set the drive as Slave, Master, or Cable Select depending on what other drives are attached to the same cable. If this is the only drive on the cable, set it to master, although if this is a Western Digital drive and the only drive on the IDE cable, it may require no jumpers at all.

There should be some marking on the drive to indicate the jumper positions for each setting.

Yes, you will need to reformat the drive afterwords, so get anything you need to keep off the drive before you do this.
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Edit:

This might help with the jumper settings, I belive it is the model you have.

http://www.maxtor.com/_files/maxtor/en_us/documentation/quick_specs/diamondmax_6800_ultra_ata_quick_specs.pdf

You probably just have to remove the jumper labled as J46 in the PDF above. Then format the drive.

If you need a tool to reformat the drive, download Maxtor's PowerMax. You will need a floppy disk for it.
Maxtor PowerMax
Although, the Windows installs should be able to do this as well.

Have fun, reinstalling windows is always a blast.

 

[mcmmotorsports]

Fixed it, had to reformat with large disk support.