I recently re-installed winxp as it was getting to the end of its life. It worked fine at first but now, a week later it is not. I have a western digital 800JB 80Gb HD, partitioned into a 55 and a 25. Now something is seriously wrong, the hard drive seems to be accessing extremely slow. If i am playing mp3's and i try to do somthing with the HD like load Word the music just stutters and jumps until the HD has stopped. Copying stuff from one partition to the other is painfully slow; 2mins to copy 100mb?? Also when the HD is accessing and for about 10 seconds afterwards, the mouse cursor is really jerky and keeps stopping as i move it around the screen. I have done a surface scan, defragged it and done a virus scan. There doesnt seem to be anything unusual in mem when i press ctl+alt+del. So is my harddrive broken? How can i test it further? Any suggestions would be appreciated. kevin

Hello, Please try to update chipset's drivers and also vga's drivers. It does not seem to be a hardware issue.

no that doesnt make any difference. it is also slow booting up even before it gets into windows, and also it is slow if i go into safe mode with command prompt. think i might have to try re-install windows again. any other suggestions?

just did a test. it took 117 seconds to copy 117mb from one partition to another. i.e. 1mb/sec! tried copying within the same partition and it took almost a minute. and the hard drive just seems to cary on reading, even after i have stopped copying.....

Too weird. Maybe it's a virus huh? Or something else. You can try to do a clean format.

very weird. i also tried running knoppix (the bootable linux cd) on it and it worked fine, copying was speedy. clean format i think. but the question is (this will sound a bit dumb) how do i actually format the c drive?? i cant get to the command line with winxp can i? and i cant format the windows boot disk why i'm in windows, and if i boot with a win98 disk i wont be able to see the ntfs disks......

i have the same hdd...press the windows key and the pause/break key to bring up the system properties window...under the hardware tab click the device manager...find the hard drive either in the ide channels or the hard disk drive folder...root around in there until u find the transfer rate...it should be udma mode 5, or ata-100...if its any slower ur settings are wrong and u may have to change them in the bios. if u see udma mode 4 or lower or even pio mode u may have to update ur bios to accept the larger hard drive.