Scandisk Restarting over and over and over

[Calculon]

I've been having HDD slowdowns recently even after format and clean install of ME. I noticed it takes a very long time to load programs especially games. Unreal Tournament takes about 6 mins to load (that's just to the opening cutscreen)! This is unacceptable for a T-Bird 1.2 GHZ with ASUS A7A266, 256 MB RAM, Voodoo 5500!

Anyways, once a program is loaded, it runs smoothly and fast. So, I think the problem is my Maxtor 40 GB HDD. Then, I tried thorough scandisk, but it keep restarting. I tried CTR+ALT+DEL and ended everything but explorer & systray. I also did it in safe mode.

I've been doing Standard scans and defrag every week without this problem. What should I do?

[YeOldeStonecat]

Just by rare chance, a friend of mine had a T-Bird machine, I forget which motherboard he had, but he plugged an internal zip ATAPI zip drive in, and it brought his system to a crawl like yours. Seems there was a conflict with the Iomega and the version Via chipset he had.

I would try unplugging all but your primary hard drive and launching UT....see if it's back to the normal 10 seconds or not.

[minir]

Hi Calculon


Nice to meet you

i don't think there is much more i can add to what you are doing.

would there perhaps be something in the background still running, like an ant-virus prog. or call waiting?

have you by any chance tried an outside defrager like Power Defrag, to see if it may help you

out.http://www.powerdefrag.com/


you might try to download something like this and have a go.

wish you luck

regards minir

[Calculon]

Thanks for the suggestions. I will try unpluging everything.

I have no problem when using Standard scan or defrag. I have that problem only when I perform thorough scandisk.

As I said, I tried in safe mode and normal mode with nothing but explorer & systray.

I think Power Defrag only defrag and not scandisk?

Thanks again for the replies.

[yort63]

Start ->run->type msconfig then goto startup tab and uncheck most of the programs that startup there, this way they do not even make it to memory on bootup. CTRL+ALT+DELETE although it shuts down the programs they are still left residing in RAM. :cool:

Unless that is microsoft figured that there are people that actually use msconfig and got rid of the program in ME:2cool:

[HMS White Star]

restarting in safe mode is not good, maybe you have some errors on the hard drive, I would likely good ahead and backup any data you have and to make sure the drive is good, write zeros to the drive, This will destroy all data, but It will also tell you if there are any errors on the drive. After it finds any errors, fdisk format and reinstall the system if the drive tests out good, if not getting it replaced might not be a bad idea.

[Calculon]

HMS White Star, what do you mean by "write zeros to the drive"? Please give me more details and instruction. Thanks

[W_I_Z_K_I_D]

Yo
Yort63
I Downloaded the power defrag and just done a defrag on all my hard drives...great program man ill recomend it to all of yall who whanto increse system performance...
Thanx for the link man
Appreciate it...
Soo...i guess you give a little and take a little ha..
here a good tweaking site you might whanto check out man....

http://www.tweaktown.com
http://Voodoo files.com

Have fun bro..
LaYtA

[rayvac]

First step is to reformat your HDD but before to do this make the following.

set your virtual memory to 0 meg.
reboot your machine.
defrag your HDD.
reset your virtual memory to let windows manage.
reboot once again.

that`s the best way to defrag your HDD and this one will work better and faster after this.

;)

[HMS White Star]

Gwscan, which is a file you can get from Gateway.com. Normally I would give you a link, but the network is dying here, speedguide.net seems to be the only site I can get too, I bet I lose access too it too, but download gwscan, you can find it on google.com.

Gwscan is a program from Gateway that runs hardware diags for basically any harddrive (cuz gateway used virtually every harddrive). One of the diags is a utility that will write zeros to the drive and compare them to what is supposed to be a drive to what is on the drive and therefore tells you if there is a problem.