Determine the manufacturer of the hard drive, go to the drive manufacturer's web
site and download the drive manufacturer's hard drive diagnostic test software.
Prepare either a bootable floppy or bootable CD with the diagnostic software
according to the manufacturer's instructions, and run the NON-DESTRUCTIVE tests.
If the diagnostics reveal even one defective sector, it is time to replace the
drive. Manufacturer's hard drive diagnostics are 1000x better than Micro$oft
scandisk. They run very close to the bare hardware iron, avoiding all the
software layers of Windows... Ben Myers

On Sun, 17 Oct 2004 01:57:47 GMT, "David Thiel" wrote:

Has anyone else experienced this?
The hard drive on this system is delivering about 10% of the disk throughput
that would be normal for a laptop drive such as this.
I used sandra to test it. It takes forever. Anything that involves the
disk drive (like defragging, or setting share permissions) takes about 10
times longer than normal.
Otherwise everything works.
I have not experienced this failure mode before.
History - the machine was fine when I first got it. I had a number of
problems after installing SP1 on top of the Compaq OEM version of XP home
(like the network adapter disappeared). The only thing that Compaq support
said was 're-install everything' and that SP1 was the "service pack from
hell".
Needless to say I was not impressed by Compaq support. So I started over
with a Microsoft XP Pro. The install went OK. I got all the Compaq driver
updates and installed them after XP had all its updates. At this time the
hard drive was behaving.
At some point (and I don't know when as the effect is subtle) the hard drive
lost 90% of its throughput.
I have had hard drives fail in the past but it was sudden (head crash). I
have little interest in starting over again. I could clone the system to a
new drive and see if it is a hard drive problem. If no one has anything
pertinent to suggest then I guess I will do it.
I do not believe that this is a virus or spyware as CPU intensive tasks are
snappy. But most general computing involves the hard drive in some way.
Compaq BIOS is so spartan and very little help.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

david d thiel (ddt)