Help! Bad HDD interface on motherboard?

[memyhome]

I just upgraded my own PC with Intel Pent. D 3.0GHz, new Gigabyte 8I945GZ-MH motherboard and 2 GB PC4200 RAM. I expected this will be blazing fast, but instead it is much slower than my old 1GHz AMD system with only 392MB RAM. Since I feel like HDD may be too old and slow, I went to bought new Maxtor 300GB SATAII drive. Installing Windows, very fast up to final stage "Saving Settings". It just stay there at 8 minute to complete. HDD light is hardly flashing, mostly steady. I reset the PC it went through the same installation blazing fast, but stalled at 8 minutes to go on Final stage of "Saving Settings". Went to sleep. 8 hours later, it moved to 6 minutes to go. Does this say SATA II interface on motherboard is bad? It seems to me data do not transfer to HDD, but stay in RAM. Help!

[glc]

Not necessarily - the drive could be defective. Test it with Powermax, it's a free download from Maxtor. You could possibly have other faulty hardware.

[memyhome]

Originally Posted by glc Not necessarily - the drive could be defective. Test it with Powermax, it's a free download from Maxtor. You could possibly have other faulty hardware.

Thanks, glc.
Amazingly, it turns out to be CD-ROM. I took out Windows CD to put PowerMax CD came with HDD. As soon as CD-ROM door is open, installation moves to finish in a few seconds. I guess I'm really lucky finished installaion before CD-ROM fails.
Thanks again for suggesting other faulty hardware.