Slow and reading HHD multiple times when booting

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bit4bit

New Member
Hi, all of the components in my specs list are pretty much brand new, I have also bought a western digital caviar green 1TB , 7200RPM, 32MB cache, and installed a brand new legitimate version of Windows Vista Business (64-bit) on it. I have installed all the drivers for my motherboard and video card, made sure the OS is up to date via windows update, installed and updated avast home edition, and checked all my hardware drivers, all of which are apparently fine according to windows - it says "this device is working properly" for all. I have also ran a memtest check when booting, which returned no errors.

However, for some reason, my computer is still running slow, and I'm absolutely baffled at how this could be!

Also, whenever I boot up, it will read the hard drive about 5 times, before actually booting into it, and I've had a similar error in the past, which got worse and worse, till the point where it continually read the hard drive, and nevcer booted into it.

I still have my old maxtor hard drive in, which I have tested with sea tools hard drive diagnostics, and got no errors, and my Western digital drive is brand new.

What could be causing these problems?
 
It sounds like a mobo issue to me. For some reason it isn't reading the hdd either because of some sort of data reading problem or the hdd's aren't configured right. You're not using RAID or anything are you? Also are the hdd's SATA or IDE? The IDE connection of my mobo went out a few days ago and my DVD drive stopped working. I bought a new SATA one and that one works great.
 
Hi, thanks for the reply. I've got my old hard drive (250 GB Maxtor diamond max21) with a single partition contaioning XP pro SP3, and have just installed the new WD drive with 3 partitions - vista business 64-bit, ubuntu 8.04, and a data partition. Both drives are SATA with no RAID arrays set up. My motherboard supports up to 6 SATA drives.

I tried looking for some motherboard diagnostics software, but couldn't find anything that looked half decent. Do you know of anything?
 
bit4bit said:
Hi, thanks for the reply. I've got my old hard drive (250 GB Maxtor diamond max21) with a single partition contaioning XP pro SP3, and have just installed the new WD drive with 3 partitions - vista business 64-bit, ubuntu 8.04, and a data partition. Both drives are SATA with no RAID arrays set up. My motherboard supports up to 6 SATA drives.

I tried looking for some motherboard diagnostics software, but couldn't find anything that looked half decent. Do you know of anything?
Click to expand...

Wow that's a ton of partitions on a single drive. That actually might be your problem in a way. What I'm thinking is that the computer is asking the mobo which partition does it want to boot to. The hard drive says that it has 3 partitions and then the computer has to search for the partition and then boot from it. It happens with Apple's boot camp when it's set up to ask the user which OS to boot into instead of doing it automatically. How do you have the partitions set up and which OS do you normally boot into?

The one thing I would try is to first unplug and unhook the second hard drive and try booting it up. If it's much quicker then the mobo is trying to access both hard drives, not to mention the 3 partitions, at once and slowing everything down. You shouldn't have ANY slow down with the rig you have in your sig, it just baffles my mind.

I don't know of any real good hd diagnostics off hand but I'm sure other people on here do. Did the WD hdd come with any software like that by chance? My Seagate did...I think lol.
 
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