[tohann]

Here's my situation. Early last week my computer took a dump. It started throwing errors (which I never saw, it was reported by my wife) and it was rebooted. When it was rebooted, it went through a lengthy checkdisk routine. It scanned and flagged hundreds files/sectors as bad and then it came back later and tried to fix them. There were three total steps that took about 2 1/2 days to complete. The good news is that this was on the second drive in the computer, not the main c:\. I found the files that couldn't be repaired or placed back into the directory where they originally were located. No biggie, the point is it looks like the drive recovered and things were running again.

Since that happened, I decided to get serious about backups and get a large external drive to hold the backups. I ended up purchasing a 500 GB Western Digital My Book from Best Buy. I got it installed and connected through USB and XP recognized it. All is well. The first backup of the c:\ took a day and a half. I waited it out since I really wanted that first baseline backup. Then I did the backup of the secondary drive. That took another day and a half.

Now, I decided I'm tired of these long backups so I get a USB 2.0 PCI card and install it today. It was recognized by XP and I think it was installed successfully.

As I did a few reboots in the past few hours before installing that card and after installing it, XP is now taking 5-10 minutes to fully boot up. And once it gets into Windows, it runs very slowly. It seems to get to a point where things will run smoothly, but that's a good 20 minutes after the first request to boot. In all honesty, this problem could've cropped up after installing the My Book since I didn't use the computer at all while it was backing up. I just let it do it's thing and it took forever.

Here is some info on the patient:

Dell Dimension 8200 purchased around 4 yrs ago
1 GB RAM
Windows XP fully patched and shouldn't have spyware

Is there some bios setting I need to change to handle the large hard drive? I haven't done any system tweaks to this point.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

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More info:

I disconnected the WD My Book and it's still booting slowly. I have also disabled the software that came with the drive that does the actual back up. It still behaves the same (super slow).

[tohann]

More info:

I disconnected the WD My Book and it's still booting slowly. I have also disabled the software that came with the drive that does the actual back up. It still behaves the same (super slow).

[The Skeptic]

Try to disconnect the "second" drive (both power and data cable) and the new drive. Run the computer with C: only. Does it make any difference?

[happyrock]

when you say.." Windows XP fully patched and shouldn't have spyware"
what Malware tools..programs do you have installed ...have you tried one of the free online scanners

[tohann]

Try to disconnect the "second" drive (both power and data cable) and the new drive. Run the computer with C: only. Does it make any difference?

Yup, sure did make a difference. I got the expected warning saying a primary drive was no longer found, but after that the boot was fast and normal. So, what does that tell us?

when you say.." Windows XP fully patched and shouldn't have spyware"
what Malware tools..programs do you have installed ...have you tried one of the free online scanners

I'm running Spybot Search & Destroy, Windows Defender, Ad-Aware and AVG Anti-virus. I haven't had an online virus scan lately, as in the last 6-8 months.

[The Skeptic]

Sorry about my delayed answer, my mail service was broken for the last two days.

It seems that the problem is with with the "second drive" on which chkdsk could not be performed. If you backed up the data on this disk I suggest that you clear format it and then run a chkdsk again.

Try to connect the new USB drive while the "second drive" is disconnected and report performance.