hard drive problems

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.basics (More info?)

george2002 wrote:

> As some of you have been reading I am working on the computer from
> hell.
> It has been a real challenge. The system has two hard drives and a
> Maxtor backup drive. I finally got the system running, in large part
> due to the help from this group, by using the second hard drive as the
> primary drive and reinstalling the system on that drive. I then backed
> up the fresh copy of XP on the Maxtor. Then I switched the hard drive
> back and tried to install a fresh copy of XP on that drive (I had a
> reason for doing that that I can't remember right now). Well, in the
> newly flashed BIOS (it worked perfectly on the other drive) move in
> slow motion. It took a long time to find the IDE drive and even after
> that moved slowly. Now I am wondering whether the REAL problem was
> that old primary hard drive in the first place. When I hook in the
> other drive the system runs through the BIOS in a flash. I don't know
> that I have explain this well enough but does it sound like the hard
> drive might be the problem? It works well when configured as the slave
> drive . . . I don't know what to think.
>
> Thank you again, George

You've done a great job of troubleshooting. If you want to be sure of
your diagnosis, you can always run a diagnostic utility from the drive
mftr.'s website. Download the file and make either a bootable floppy or
cd with it. Boot with it and do a thorough test on the drive.

But if it were me, I wouldn't bother unless this was a new expensive
drive I needed to return for a refund. If it is an older drive, just
toss it and move on.

Malke
--
MS-MVP Windows User/Shell
Elephant Boy Computers
www.elephantboycomputers.com
"Don't Panic"