Massive system slow down

[NBee]

Hi, I run WinXP with Athlon1.4Gh, 512Mb.

This morning I turned my PC on and it took an age to start up. The whole process was working at a tenth of its usual speed. Even when the desktop finally showed, things are behaving strangely, long pauses before anything happens.

What could have happened? Where do I start to look?

Thanks for any advice.

[EzyStvy]

Did it happen a second time when you tested it?

[corosus]

do you have anny virus-protection installed??

[NBee]

Yes I tried it again and it was as bad, although once it actually got started it wasn't as bad as last time.

It is particularly slow in the section that shows the black screen between the XP intro screen and the desktop showing.

No, I have no antivirus software.

[ktkendall]

I have seen things like CDROM drives and harddrives start to go bad and can cause such symptoms as you describe. Especially if it really hangs during disk detection then that may be a clue. Even mouse or keyboard could cause such behavior, probably first step is to try to determine if it's hardware or software problem, by removing devices and see if trouble clears...

[ktkendall]

That would probably be a driver problem but still could be actual hardware going bad and windows is having trouble initializing that particular peice of hardware..Check into your event viewer under system and see if there are any errors logging in there especially during startup...

[Cricket]

No antivirus? You better go here and check your system out.

Cricket

[KHT]

There`s always the question too if you added any programs or devices recently. Try unistalling them starting with the most recent.

When the system is running open task manager and see if everything running is what is supposed to be.

[johnnybatters12]

Originally posted by NBee Hi, I run WinXP with Athlon1.4Gh, 512Mb. This morning I turned my PC on and it took an age to start up. The whole process was working at a tenth of its usual speed. Even when the desktop finally showed, things are behaving strangely, long pauses before anything happens. What could have happened? Where do I start to look? Thanks for any advice.

Check out this post - I have the same problem every now and then. Not all the time though.

http://discussions.hardwarecentral.c...178#post786178

[NBee]

Unfortunately the problem, as suggested above, was due to what seems to be a faulty secondary hard drive.

When I start up now I get a checkdisk operation which reports unreadable sectors on drive D. Then when it finally gets started I can't read the D drive, it says 'inpage operation error'.

I only bought this drive a couple of months ago, an IBM Deskstar. It was to back up important data, which it appears I may now have lost. Is there anything I can do to try and retrieve it?

[NBee]

Anyone know if I can save my drive?

[RodneyMargis]

Call drivesavers they can get data of most harddrives. but be warned they are expensive

[glc]

Professional data recovery is gonna cost you at least $1000. You can download a demo of Ontrack Easy Recovery - it will tell you what it can recover, then you buy it to do the actual recovery - the unrestricted version will cost you $200, they have a $80 version that will recover a limited number of files.

Note that if the bios no longer sees the drive, self-service data recovery like that won't work.

You can try running chkdsk /r on the drive - this will scan for bad sectors and lock them out, this may get the drive working good enough to get some or most of your files off.

Unfortunately, the quality of IBM Deskstars has slipped a LOT, failures such as this are not uncommon. IBM has even sold off their hard drive division to Hitachi.