Subject: Another Slow Hard Drive Issue

Ack, I am having a problem.

Access to my hard drive is a tad slow.

I am running win 2K sp4, on a 1gig hz machine 768meg ram. I have a
Maxtor 200gig hard drive on the second IDE channel. It is plugged into a
removable tray.

I recently went to device manager, disabled the drive, then removed it.
Then stuck in another drive, enabled, copied files, disabled, and then
removed it. Then I stuck the Maxtor back in and enabled it. All fine.

Problem is that now the access time is about six times slower. It
reads/writes correctly, never any errors, just takes longer to do the
access. Also, the machine is very slow when doing large file copying, ie
the mouse cursor drags and is slow. Before, everything was zippy copied
large files many times faster than now, and the machine didnt suffer in
performance when doing this copying. It takes about 12 mins now to copy
700 meg of data to or from another hard drive on a different ide channel.


It is the master drive on the ide cable, w/a CDRW. Device Manager says
for "Device 0": "Transfer Mode" is "DMA if available", and "Current
Transfer Mode" is "Not Available".

I tried another posters suggestion of forcing it to "PIO Only" rebooting,
changing back, etc. No help. Everything is "Auto Detect", checked BIOS,
etc.

I dont know what is causing the problem, nothing has changed except that
swap, any ideas?

Where it says: "Device: Autodetection" that combo box is disabled.

Thanks,

-jim

jim <deferj4.TakeThisOut@no_spam_juo.com> wrote in message
news:f05Mb.4305$et1.86@nwrddc03.gnilink.net...

 > Ack, I am having a problem.

 > Access to my hard drive is a tad slow.

More than a tad.

 > I am running win 2K sp4, on a 1gig hz machine 768meg ram.
 > I have a Maxtor 200gig hard drive on the second IDE channel.
 > It is plugged into a removable tray.

Those trays can be a problem.

 > I recently went to device manager, disabled the drive, then removed it.
 > Then stuck in another drive, enabled, copied files, disabled, and then
 > removed it. Then I stuck the Maxtor back in and enabled it. All fine.

 > Problem is that now the access time is about six times slower. It
 > reads/writes correctly, never any errors, just takes longer to do the
 > access. Also, the machine is very slow when doing large file copying, ie
 > the mouse cursor drags and is slow. Before, everything was zippy copied
 > large files many times faster than now, and the machine didnt suffer in
 > performance when doing this copying. It takes about 12 mins now to copy
 > 700 meg of data to or from another hard drive on a different ide channel.

 > It is the master drive on the ide cable, w/a CDRW. Device
 > Manager says for "Device 0": "Transfer Mode" is "DMA if
 > available", and "Current Transfer Mode" is "Not Available".

That's your problem, DMA isnt being used.

 > I tried another posters suggestion of forcing it to
 > "PIO Only" rebooting, changing back, etc. No help.
 > Everything is "Auto Detect", checked BIOS, etc.

 > I dont know what is causing the problem, nothing
 > has changed except that swap, any ideas?

That OS family will disable DMA if it sees a
significant error rate with that IDE controller.

Try deleting the IDE controller in the Device Manager and
rebooting and letting it install it again. That should fix that.

 > Where it says: "Device: Autodetection" that combo box is disabled.<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->