[help] Hard Drive

Ok, so I had some corrupt crap happen last night with my winbox. Couldnt boot, so I bought a second drive today, installed that, installed the old drive to get all the files off if it, and something is bugging me.

Now this may be normal, but im paranois so wanted to check with yall.

When I copy files from the second drive (the old one) to the new drive, my cpu usage spikes wayyy up. The system pretty much crawls.

No here is the gist of my systm, p4 2.5 ghz 512mb ram, win xp sp2. And the drive is clean.

Heres the set up, main drive running off ide1 Cableselect, second drive off of ide1 cable select.

So, help me out, what am I missing here, or is this normal.

FYI, I thought about running the second drive off of the second IDE (cdrom) would that be of any benefit.

#217433

maybe whatever happened to the old drive is causing the slowdown... it's having some sort of hard time transferring information.

it was always told to me that ideally for performance, the master h.d. should be alone on the primary IDE, and a secondary h.d and cd/dvd drive on the secondary IDE... granted, though, that it's common to have 2 h.d. and 2 cd/dvd drives in the system so it's necessary to use all 4 ports. just make sure the cd drive is slaved to the h.d., not the other way around. otherwise, you would experience a slowdown.

basically what i'm saying, i would put the new drive on the primary and the old drive/cd drive on the secondary... if you're not keeping the old drive, i would still put the cd on the secondary.

hope this helps some

#217442

it shouldn't be that slow, but since you're copying drives, you should try this:

1. install new drive as secondary drive.

2. keep old drive as primary.

3. get the drive manufacturer's tools (e.g. wd has a drive copy tool) and copy drives within windows.

4. install new drive as primary drive. it'll copy everything (perfect image), and i have not had any problems.

#217444

Thanks all,

Ok, the reason for the new drive is that the oldwindows install was corrupt, chkdsk didnt work, fixboot didnt work, repair windows didnt work.

So I figured it was time to buy a new drive anyway to back up all my work and stuff.

The only other thing I can think is that maybe like wookie said, on that second drive there is still a corruption so what I am hoping is that once I format that drive it will resolved whatever the problem is.

And so I have this straight, run the main drive off of channel1 and the cd and second drive off channel 2 with the cd as the slave, and the drive off the master plug. Is that correct?

#217447

you can set it up however you want. i do this:

1: primary drive, secondary drive.

2: cd burner, dvd rom.

never had a problem. some people like to have drives on different channels, but it still shouldn't be causing the problems you're having.

#217461

Ok, well I think I'm getting somewhere. I have swapped the drive out to the second channel, same problems.

I have one more thing Im going to try before my suspicions are coming true. THis is to stop the Csel, and run the main drive as the master, second as slave.

My suspicion is this.

The new drive I just bought is an 8mb cache. I THINK the old one is only two, so does it make sense that when running the higher cach drive as the main, the lower cache one is going to slow stuff down. My thoughts were to format the 2mb cache drive as the main, and the 8mb as the slave, that way the 8mb one is stepping down to 2.

Am I right with any of this?

#217462

Nevermind, Im such an idiot, how many times must a man forget to turn on autodetect in the bios, DUHH.

Anyway, thanks everyone for the help, I relaly appreciate it.

#217474