Hi

This happens to me for the third time so I decided to ask for some help before reinstalling my XP Home (for the fourth time).

The problem: few months after installation of my XP Home (it runs on a laptop), HD Tune test results look like in the attached screenshot. The drive is ST9100823A, it seems to run just fine for few months and then the performance rapidly drops. Seatools for DOS found 1 bad sector and fixed it. I scanned the entire system with 2 antivirs and spybot - nothing found. I also defragmented the drive (and ran scandisk of course) - no errors found, no improvement noticed.

I know that reinstallation of the system will fix it but I'd very much like to avoid it.

Any ideas what it might be?

Simon

An easy way to solve the issue is to go to the Device Manager and delete/"uninstall" the IDE/SATA controller that is used by this drive. Then you just reboot the system, Windows re-detects the controller, and you have your full speed.

The problem is that when Windows encounters a bad sector on a hard drive, it switches it to PIO mode (no UDMA). Easy way - re-install the controller. Hard way - look in the registry (there are switches for DMA mode, I just do not remember what they are).

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Dmitry