60gig ATA100 IDE HD running incredibly slow

[spiritfire]

Hi all,

ive recently built a new PC for a family member and purchased a 60gig ATA100 IDE hard disk oem from ebuyer.com (their choice not myne). the problem is that ive installed the o/s (winxp pro) numerous times and the damn thing takes literally 5 minutes to load once the user has logged in. ive checked the ram, tried it with 128, 256 and 512 pc133sdram and all have produced the same results. ive also swapped over eall other perpherals - mobo, processor, cd drives, sound, graphics card etc. and the O/S still takes 5/6 mins to load.

incidentally, i tried running a low level format via the winxp CD boot and was given the error message that the format could not continue because of an unspecified problem on the HD. ive tried to find a manufacturer on the HD and through ebuyer but have had no luck.

does anyone have any ideas on how to get this damn thing running at a resepectable speed?

specs for PC: -

duron 1.1 processor
ECS K7S5A mobo
128 meg 133sdram
ebuyer oem 60gig ata100 ide HD
ATI Radeon 7000 agp
SB 4.1 PCI
12x dvd rom IDE (not used during test)
40x 12x 24x liteon cdrw ide
win xp pro


PS. ive tried using 40 wire and 80 wire ide cables (the 40 with black plugs on each end and the 80 with blue at 1 end and black at the other)

[ktkendall]

You definately want to go with the 80 wire cable and jumper the drive to cable select. Aside from that, does that PC have the onboard LAN, or an add on lan card?? If you do and there is nothing plugged into it, that could cause long time from login to desktop. If you have the onboard lan and aren't using it, go into the BIOS and disable it..

[TwoRails]

Sounds like the DMA check box is not checked in Device Manager, spiritfire. Give it a look, and if it's not checked, then check it, reboot, and it should be a lot better.

TwoRails

[glc]

With XP, DMA is not enabled on the drives in device manager, it's enabled on the IDE *controllers* - on the Advanced Settings tab, DMA if available in the spin box.