Annoying PC problem

[Gribble]

Hi there, long time lurker, first time poster.

My problem. My PC effectively died on me. I knew i had a hard drive error so i surmised this was the root of my problems. I purchased a new SATA drive. Windows then refused to install on this drive, crashing everytime i got anywhere on installation. I removed one of my RAM sticks as a start in testing if one of them (i have 3 * 512mb sticks) might be the problem. No more crashes. Now i have two new problems.

Firstly, my floppy disk drive (which of course i require to set up my SATA drive) isn't working properly. It shows its light all the time, even with no disk in it. It also refuses to read any dsk put in it.

Secondly, i swapped in an old IDE harddrive to see if i could use that as a boot drive and then use my chunky SATA drive for games, files, etc...

However, windows took about 8-12 hours to install (not sure exactly, i went to work) and then ran EXTREMELY slow when it was up. CPU usage was up to 100% opening a simply folder (windows explorer/system idle using 30%/70% between them)

Tried installing windows on the SATA drive whihc had a partial install on it (from before when it was crashing all the time). Again the install is taking ages. around 10 minutes for every "microsoft minute". half an hour has seen it go from "39 minutes to go" to "36 minutes to go".

I'm running quite a ninja machine so the speed issues aren't old hardware. its a athlon 64 CPU, 1Gb RAM, 6800GT video card.

Any help anyone can offer would be most appreciated. Particularly the problem with the slowness.

 

[mailpup]

Here are some possibilities. For your floppy, make sure the data connector is tight to the back of the floppy drive and to the motherboard. It might have come loose when you were working on the hard drives. Otherwise you can replace it with a new one as they are very inexpensive.

In your BIOS make sure the SATA controllers are enabled.

Check the IDE controller to which your IDE hard drive is connected to make sure it didn't get switched from DMA mode to the much slower PIO mode. Sometimes Windows will do this if the drive connected to it has problems. Check this in the Control Panel > System > Hardware > Device Manager. If it is in PIO mode, you can try to switch it back right there. But it might not stay that way after a restart. Check it. If not, one way to fix it is to uninstall the controller and let Windows reinstall it after a restart. This actually worked for me but with an optical drive. For more info about this issue see this article: Click here

 

[Rick]

Firstly, my floppy disk drive (which of course i require to set up my SATA drive) isn't working properly. It shows its light all the time, even with no disk in it. It also refuses to read any dsk put in it.

The continous light means your cable is backwards or upside down. I could be a defective drive.. anything goes with that kind of stuff... But you'll have the same problem with a backwards/upside down floppy cable. Make sure the end of the cable that is "split" is in your floppy drive. The cable end that is solid all the way across should be in your board. There's usually a red stripe that runs along the edge of the cable, which usually faces the power cable of the floppy drive. But again, this can vary....