Second Hard drive hogs up resources in WinXP

[Ryan Alcantara]

I recently purchased a newer hard drive to replace my three year old harddrive. After installing WinXP on the new one I decided to use the old 40gig as a backup. When I connected the old drive I immediately noticed a performance lag in WinXP. When I checked TaskManager I found that my cpu usage was fluctuating from 17 to about 98%. It would keep going through that cycle of cpu usage. After letting the PC sit for 5 min or so the usage was down to a stable rate and stopped fluctuating. The problem would resurface when I tried to access or modify files on that second harddrive. Currently I have the second hard drive disconnected and WinXp is running smoothly even with the new SP2, but I hate to have a 40gig harddrive sitting around doing nothing. Any suggestions?

[glc]

Have you verified proper cabling and jumpering?

You may want to go into Disk Management and remove the partitions - and reinitialize (partition and format) it. If there is data on the drive you need to keep, copy it to the new main drive first.

[Ryan Alcantara]

Thanks....I checked it and there was something screwy with the partition so I had to delete it manually and now it seems to work fine...