Slow down after installing a large hard drive.

I have a AMD Athlon 1.33CPU on a Asus A7A 266 Motherboard. I have 512k of DDR Ram. I have a Weston Digital 40G hard drive as the primary slave and have just installed a 160G Maxtor hard drive as the primary master. I am running Windows XP Pro. Since putting in this drive I have noticed that the system has slowed right down.. it is driving me nuts! When I first installed this large drive, the system only showed 137G so I went to Maxtors site and downloaded a patch called Big Drive Enabler. This forced the computer to show the whole drive. Everything is so slow and I have noticed that the CPU is often running at 90 - 100% and yet I can't always notice what is running. Have tried the task manager but no joy,am now at a lose. Can any of you big guys or girls help this little ole woman to get to the bottom of this problem... lol
Please make it in plain English as although I am not a beginner where computers are concerned, I am not an expert either!!!

 

Was it running this slow before you installed "Big Drive Enabler"?

 

Start -> My Computer, right click, choose Properties. On Hardware Tab press Device Manager. Expand IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers and double click Primary IDE channel. Under Advanced Settings tab, set Device 1 Transfer Mode to "DMA If Available", and see if that helps.

 

Make that Device 0. Well, actually you want them both set to DMA If Available.

 

Wait, 512K of ram?

 

I am not sure if it was running slow prior to Big Drive Enabler. I was more worried about not being able to see all my nice new big drive!!!! I know, I should get a life. ha ha. Thats what my family tell me anyway. I did re-install Windows a little while after because it was running slow and I did not put BDE back straight away. It was running slow with or without it, so I don't think it was that.

 

Ooops, sorry, 512mb of ram. lol

 

I have the big drive as Primary Master and the smaller drive as slave. I have DMA enabled on both drives.

 

Weird, adding a new HDD should SPEED-UP your comp.
Maybe you should set the small hdd to master and the bigger to slave..

 

Are the drives set properly in your BIOS? AUTO, usually.

 

I tried changing them around the other day. No go. I tried just putting the small drive in on its own as Master, but it wouldn't find it. I made double sure the jumper was set to Master. When I put the large drive in on its own as Master it showed up correctly. I have had the small drive in as Secondary Master and that was fine. I updated the bios on my motherboard last night but even that has not made any difference to the speed its going.. slow! I am sure both drives are set to Auto in the bios. Weird isn't it. I will be away until Sunday evening. Would be grateful if you could think of any other things I could try. I am at a lose!!

 

Well, let's try to eliminate some physical things. Do you have an 80-conductor IDE cable, and is the master drive hooked to the end connector and the slave to the middle? You may need to pysically rearrange the mounting positions of the drives to hook them up this way.

 

Hi, I am not sure if I have an 80-conductor IDE cable. How can I tell which one I have got? Yes, the Master drive is connected to the end connector and the Slave to the middle one.

 

Compare it to your floppy cable-- do the individual wires look finer and more numerous?

 

I have just scoured my motherboards handbook and yes I do have 40pin 80-conductor IDE cables.

 

Have you tried running the 160GB alone without the 40GB to see if it makes a difference?

 

two things:

do you have service pack 1 installed?

are you sure your motherboard supports 48-bit logic block addressing? you may want to contact Asus to find that out as I skimmed your mobo specs and the manuel and I didn't notice any mention of it, but then again my mobo manuel didn't mention it either and I have a 250GB WD and it works perfectly fine

here's a tut on how to enable 48-bit LBA(which i would think is better than using whatever Maxtor gave you):

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;303013&Product=winxp

 

wuts the speed of the bigger drive, When I hooked a Seagate 4.1 gig Hardrive as a slave and a Seagate 80GiG, 7200, 2mb...i noticed some slowdown due to the 4.1 being a slower drive. Could it be that ur 40 GiG was a 7200RPM and ur 160 is a 5400RPM u prob would notice some slowdown or vice versa withe the drive speeds. My freind bought a Emachines cuz the specs looked good 2800+, 512, 160 GiG, DVD burner....turns out the 160 GiG drive is a 5400RPM slug.

 

The 160G is 7200 as well as the smaller drive.

 

Yes, I have SP1 loaded and yes, my motherboard supports 48 LBA ( I had to update the bios )

I have tried leaving just the 160G Maxtor drive connected and it makes no difference. I have noticed that as soon as I do anything, the processor jumps straight up to 90 - 100%? Even just clicking on My Docs pushes the processor to the limit! Any ideas!! Please!!!!

 

I always liked Asus motherboards, but I'm beginning to suspect this one if you have SP1 and Big Drive Enabler-- which is really just a registry modifier-- and it's still not working. Do you have the capability to try the 160GB in another system-- preferably one of very recent vintage? I notice the latest BIOS revision for the A7A-266-- a retired board-- is over a year old, and 48-bit LBA was added in an even earlier revision. Other possibilities to try-- in order of trouble/expense-- might include replacing the IDE cable, partitioning the drive into two 80GB, or obtaining a UATA133 PCI IDE contoller card.

 

I may be able to get my son in law to try it in his fairly new machine that he built himself. (He is an IT manager so is quite knowledgable) He is away at the moment but will be back on Wednesday. He had a quick look at mine before he went but couldn't figure out what was wrong.... I was hoping to be able to solve the problem before he got back so I could earn brownie points. lol. I am not sure what my PSU is. I was wondering if that might need replacing with a 550. How can I find out without opening my case again. My machine is just over 3 years old now and I would love to put in a new motherboard bundle, at the moment though, I can't afford to.