Hard drive slow

sammytheman

In Runtime
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Hey fellas lately one of my HD is not working properly. I have a total of 3 and on the one that is not working, I have many movies that when I open them they are EXTREMELY slow. It takes 2 mins to open windows media player. I tried to open it using divx, VLC media player and they are all the same. When I play movies from my other 2 drives, they play flawlessly. All 3 are Seagate brand. I tested the faulty HD with "SeaTools" by 1st doing a "S.M.A.R.T Check" and then "Short Drive Self Test". Both passed. When I ran the "Long Drive Self Test", I got failed error midway through. The other strange thing is that at one point the 3rd drive went missing in "My Computer". I checked device manager under "disk drives" to see if it was there, and it was not. I went to BIOS, but it was there :eek: Also when I restart my PC, the windows green bar going across comes up, and then the screen goes black for up to 20 mins before the login screen appears. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. Oh and I have Vista 64 BTW.
 
Well, your hard drive is failing then. Backup all your data from it ASAP before you do anything else. Then replace the drive. Do check the SATA/IDE and HDD power cables to ensure that it's not a cable fault.

You might also want to go to Control Panel -> System -> Hardware -> Device Manager and check under IDE controllers if the HDD is running in UDMA mode (default, fast mode) or whether it has downgraded to the PIO mode (slow). It switches to PIO mode only if it encounters errors repeatedly.
 
Thanks ranvir, under "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers" I see this:

"IDE Channel
IDE Channel
IDE Channel
IDE Channel
IDE Channel
IDE Channel
Intel(R) ICH8 2 port Serial ATA Storage Controller - 2825
Intel(R) ICH8 4 port Serial ATA Storage Controller - 2850
Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller"

I don't see any of what you have mentioned. Also, dumb question, how do I back up my data? Do I back them up to 1 of the other 2 HDs?
 
On my laptop (from which I am posting now), right clicking the 'Primary' or 'Secondary' IDE channels and going to 'Advanced Settings' tells me which transfer mode is in use. For HDDs, UDMA is the default mode.

See this screenshot I just took.
http://img81.imageshack.us/img81/9881/udma.jpg

In any case, I've never heard of a faulty drive fixing itself, so it's best you backup as soon as possible.

You can copy over your files (personal data files, not system files) to one of the other two drives (if you know that they're reliable) or to an external HDD until you replace the faulty HDD. Then you can copy them back on to the new replacement drive :)

If the faulty HDD contains your Operating system, then you'll have reinstall the OS and whatever programs you use on your new HDD. You cannot drag-copy an existing OS over to a new drive, but you can image it (not recommended, if the source drive itself is faulty).

Hope this helps :)
 
Have you tried putting the hard drive in another computer and seeing how it works? If it's the same result, you might want to think about backing up your data before you lose it all because it sounds like the hard drive is packing up.
 
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