All of a sudden my main hard drive became very slow (like 10-20x slower then normal). Boot up now takes well over 10 minutes while before it was certainly less then a minute. Starting a browser window (google) takes almost a minute. The hard drive is an Segate 7200 rpm, 120 Gb (don't remember the exact name) and was bought less the a year ago. It's split into two FAT32 partitions of equal size (~60Gb each). First thought was that some virus/spyware was causing the problem. I did a full system scan with norton-antivirus (Pro version with the latest defentitions), nothing. Next I scan the complete system with Ad-aware 6 pro, nothing! I also used some other spy-ware removal software, nothing. Second line of thought: fragmentation or lack of free space. I ran sysinternals defrag-manager but the speed loss is the same. The first partition (C:) has over 30Gb free space and the second around 10Gb. Third try, resintalling IDE drivers. I removed all IDE drivers and rebooted, let windows resintall them. Then downloaded the latest via 4 in one (the motherboard is using the via PT800 chipset), nothing. Fourth try, please advice! One funny thing I noted was that if I booted from a floppy and search all directories recursivly I think it performed slower than usual. Is this indicating that Windows and drivers can't be the blame? Any advice are most welcome since reinstalling computers isn't my favourite hobby ;) Cheers Eq.

i doubt the drive is to fault. is it a server or a normal pc? seagate are one step ahead of the other disks manufacturers in reliability. i know norton didnt pick anything up, but try going to : http://housecall.trendmicro.com and using their free online virus scan. numerous times its picked things up that norton hasnt. (but norton is better than mcafee !) i have had problems using the via chipset drivers, on all my via boards i just let w2k use generic drivers, the via ones seem to cause problems. if your really wanting to prove that the drive is at fault, get somebody to whack it into a near identical machine, or as a slave in another w2k/xp machine, and see if the speed is the same. if so its the drive, if not then id say its time to re-install windows. the blaster worm has done this to me before.