Problem with HDD speed on bual boot PC

[pioneerx01]

Hi,

I have a dual boot laptop and recently I am having problems with the read speeds om my single HDD. When I am on first OS I am getting speeds of 1.6MBps on entire HDD across the board. When I go to second OS I am getting full 40MBps. Why is that and is there way to fix the first OS without reinstalling it?

Thanks, Pioneer

 

[DelJo63]

describe First OS vs. Second OS.

also how do you measure HDD performance on BOTH systems?
-- this can easily be an apple / oranges comparison.

 

[pioneerx01]

The first of is WinXP Home SP2 and the second one is WinXP Pro SP2. On both I have used software called HD-Speed. WinXP Home SP2 is getting ~40MBps and WinXP Pro SP2 is getting ~1.6MBps. Both partitions are on the same HDD.

 

[gbhall]

Since both partitions, as I understand you, are on the same HDD, there should certainly not be that much difference. Some suggestions;

software is telling porkies, use another to check.
first partition and second partition are formatted differently, maybe FAT32 and NTFS, or if both NTFS, the block sizes may be very different.
the first partition may be huge, the other small, at the top of the drive.
one partition may be heavily fragmented.
There may be completely different cache sizes in the two OS's
There may be different assignment of visual effects - see system | advanced | performance | performance button | settings | visual effects
There may be different assignment of foreground and background processing priority - see system | advanced | settings | advanced cpu and cache settings

 

[pioneerx01]

-Software is OK I can feel the speed difference when, copying, booting, opening,...
-Both are NTFS and default block sizes
-one partition is 20GB other 100GB (120GB HDD)
-Every night I run diskepper
-"There may be completely different cache sizes in the two OS's" I don't know what you mean by that. First OS is WinXP Home and other is WinXP pro, both SP2.
-Effect are default.
-No priorities assigned.

These above are all very good ideas, but they would only apply if I would change something, or is the Second OS did not work from beginning. However, the OS just stopped "working" in a snap of a finger one day. Before that it was all mice and "speedy."

Thanks for the ideas, I got pissed last night and reinstalled the sucker. Just the messed up OS. All is good now.
However, now I can not get to my first OS. The partition is intact and so is the windows and all the other data. I played around with startup and recovery options and manually modified them, but I do not know if I am wording it correctly. Any ideas?

 

[gbhall]

you can edit boot.ini (a system, hidden,read-only file). Add another line describing whichever partition is no longer there and you will get dual-booting back.

http://mirror.href.com/thestarman/asm/mbr/bootini.htm

By cache, I mean what you find on system | advanced | performance | virtual memory

Quite why you want two almost identical operating Systems is a puzzle. You could just use pro and have the other partition as backup with drive image to get you back up when yhings go wrong.