Added hard-drive slows down startup and programs

hbhungarian · #1 29th Jan 2008, 22:35

Hi, i just recently added an additional 180GB Toshiba hard drive to my HP computer that had a 30gb hard drive that filled up fast. I set the toshiba as slave and kept the smaller one as master, as it originally was. Now the startup takes 5 mintues and all my programs that i run extremely slow down. MY mouse lags a lot and programs freeze up. I have almost 800mb of ram so i know thats not the problem because it was running fine before. I deleted alot of stuff from the smaller harddrive and now the majority is free space on it. Would my computer be faster if i put the toshiba in an external enclosure?? any ideas wat could be wrong?? please help, thanks for reading this long of a message =]

cbell · #2 30th Jan 2008, 09:24

Are both drives IDE? Or is the toshiba SATA?

Check to make sure both drives aren't set to master or slave, and that the master drive is connected to the end of the IDE cable and not the middle.

hbhungarian · #3 30th Jan 2008, 15:11

both are IDE and i already had it set up as master and slave. they are connected correctly too...still have the problem :( any more tips?

**philthomas** · #4 30th Jan 2008, 15:20

Check in Device Manager/IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers ... right click the Primary Channel, select Properties/Advanced and check your DMA Settings have not reverted to PIO Mode.

hbhungarian · #5 30th Jan 2008, 15:52

so i checked it, and the tranfer mode is DMA if available, but the current transfer mode is PIO mode...and this is for both hard drives...wat do i do now??

**philthomas** · #6 30th Jan 2008, 15:56

The easiest way is to right click the channel and select Uninstall, then reboot the PC.

Windows will automatiucally detect and reinstall the Controller and any Drives that are on it.

hbhungarian · #7 30th Jan 2008, 16:22

i did wat u said and it made no difference, the transfer mode is still PIO...could something be wrong with my hard drive? wat else can i do?

**philthomas** · #8 30th Jan 2008, 16:56

Do you know if you have a 40 conductor or 80 conductor IDE Cable ?

If 40, it would be a good idea to change this to an 80.

cbell · #9 31st Jan 2008, 07:35

If your hard drives are running in PIO mode, then that's why it's so slow. Not only does PIO have a slow transfer rate, but it requires a lot of CPU overhead. Did you try uninstalling both controllers and restarting the comp, allowing them to reinstall? That should fix the problem.

What OS are you running? Older versions of Windows 2K and XP had a bug where it could permanently revert the drive to PIO mode, but this was fixed with SP2, and it usually happens over time, not immediately.

It's not likely that your HDD is damaged, since both of them are stuck in PIO mode. If nothing else works, I'd take them out again and just make sure that the master/slave jumpers are correct and that they are on the proper ends of the IDE cable.

**philthomas** · #10 31st Jan 2008, 09:53

Who didn't read the whole thread then