PCA Forums

OK here's my current problem. Lately, WinXP has been crashing on me a lot and rebooting. So, after that, the "checkdisk" kicks in and does it's thing. Usually it's pretty quick, but lately it will run VERY slow, like 1% a minute, which is frustrating. Sometimes I'll even lose data! Luckily I haven't lost anything important yet but it can happen. Then it takes a long time to go thru it's "checking available HD space" thing after that. It takes like over 3 hours for this to get done. Is it doing a surface scan? That's what it seems like, as a regular disk check should be quick. Anyone else ever run into this? I can't even get into XP now, it wants to do the 3 hour checkdisk or else it just hangs or reboots when trying to get into XP... I heard a "click" when booting up, I'm thinking my HD may have bad sectors and it's getting worse...? This is freakin me out, never ran into like this before. So I guess what I'm asking is, why is chkdsk taking so frickin long and is my HD dying and is there anything I can do to about it?

Oh and I'm still using FAT32 since I'm still dual-booting with Win98SE, but I'm thinking of going NTFS since I never use 98 anymore.

P4 1.6 // MSI GF4 Ti4600 // WD 80GB HD 72krpm // 512 RAM // SB Audigy // Plextor 16x12x40 // 19" Viewsonic // Logitech Optical // Windows XP // Cable Modem

Sounds like a loose IDE cable or a bad one. Ask NASCARFOOL he had a similar problem and thats what it was. With him it was taking it forever to load XP i think.

FAT32... heh. you couldn't have a filesystem more suited to data loss.

anywho, are you overclocked? might explain the crashing.

I heard a "click" when booting up,

anytime I've run into bad sectors, I've had more than one click. MY 40GB Deathstar would click repeatedly.

You might want to low-level format and try again. bad sectors can cause disk scans to go reeeeeal slow.

I concur. Loose IDE cable or dirty contacts. That or the drive is getting ready to go south.

Change the cables and insert and remove them a few times to clean the pins. Then download the drive manufacturer's disk utility and test the drive with it.

Another possibility is EIDE controller driver problems. I've seen a problem like that on a Promise RAID controller when I upgraded the driver to a beta. Went back to the previous driver and it was fine.

Same as Predator said, also check to see if the hard drive is in PIO or DMA mode. When I had a loose cable, it took XP a full 15 minutes to boot up.

I'll check the cables but I don't believe that's it, this "slowness" isn't persistant, it's just sometimes, but hey it doesn't hurt to check, if it's that simple I'll be happy. I am overclocking but only mildly (p4 1.5 to 1.62). Oh, and yeah it's only 1 click, so I guess that would be it's shutting down or starting up...

I used the WD Data Lifeguard Tools earlier and it went thru it's long check and found some bad sectors that it tried to repair. Anyway, now the chkdsk is fast but XP still won't load, guess I might have to do an XP Repair which is asking me for an administrator password which I have no idea what it is, I don't think I ever made a password, sigh and ugh!

Well the cables weren't loose at all, but I noticed a small "notch" cut out in the HD ATA66 cable. Is that supposed to be there?

I've seen some ata66 cables with that notch cut in them before. You might try a new cable if you have a spare it might not hurt to do it. It could have a wire in there that has broke and once in a while makes enough contact to work right. If the drive has bad sectors though it very possibly could be going bonkers on you too...

Well the cables weren't loose at all, but I noticed a small "notch" cut out in the HD ATA66 cable. Is that supposed to be there?

yes, it's how the controller senses that the cable is 80-wire. most cables seem to do this inside the connector, though.

Well whatever it was I couldn't fix it, my WinXP was FUBAR, it wouldn't load and I couldn't repair it so I had to install a fresh copy... at least I could back up whatever I had to since I dual-boot and still use FAT32 (which is why I do that! ). Doubt it was a virus, I always have my scanner going. Anyway, it could have been anything, but everything seems to be back to normal now and quick again...