Hi,
Posting this here for the reference of others as I have seen this problem reported occasionally.
XP Pro installed on 80GB Seagate HDD on ASUS A7N9X-X, XP2500, 512KB DDRAM.
1. System very slow to boot - timed at 835 seconds (yes near enough 15 minutes).
2. Programs run ok but slow to load.
I narrowed the problem fairly quickly to the HDD after reading something Mechbgon posted in response to another post (thanks again Mech).
Using Seagate's SEATools (a long process as it was so slow) I determined that the drive and the other hardware was operating as per specs.
Using Passmark Software "Performance Test" it confirmed what Seatools was saying and noted that disk reading was about 24 times slower than normal.
It appeared that there was some form of corruption to the file system that was slowing everything down. This is a little beyond my experience, as such corruptions I would have thought, would have stopped it booting not just slow it. I ran checkdsk with the autofix options in an attempt to repair the problem. It required 4 restarts and took 36 hours (yes a day and a half) to complete.
At the end of the marathon the computer is now restored to full functionality.
I would be interested in speculations about which what why was corrupted and how it could have caused this problem.
Regards
Posting this here for the reference of others as I have seen this problem reported occasionally.
XP Pro installed on 80GB Seagate HDD on ASUS A7N9X-X, XP2500, 512KB DDRAM.
1. System very slow to boot - timed at 835 seconds (yes near enough 15 minutes).
2. Programs run ok but slow to load.
I narrowed the problem fairly quickly to the HDD after reading something Mechbgon posted in response to another post (thanks again Mech).
Using Seagate's SEATools (a long process as it was so slow) I determined that the drive and the other hardware was operating as per specs.
Using Passmark Software "Performance Test" it confirmed what Seatools was saying and noted that disk reading was about 24 times slower than normal.
It appeared that there was some form of corruption to the file system that was slowing everything down. This is a little beyond my experience, as such corruptions I would have thought, would have stopped it booting not just slow it. I ran checkdsk with the autofix options in an attempt to repair the problem. It required 4 restarts and took 36 hours (yes a day and a half) to complete.
At the end of the marathon the computer is now restored to full functionality.
I would be interested in speculations about which what why was corrupted and how it could have caused this problem.
Regards