DPC and Hardware Interupt Problems

Hey guys
I didn't know exactly where to place this, since the major problem I am having is figuring out exactly where the problem is.

First. I am running Windows XP Home Edition Service Pack 2. 2.20 gigahertz AMD Athlon 64. NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS. NVIDIA nForce Networking Controller. And a few SATA Hard Drives.

Everything has been running great until about a week ago when things sometimes got slow. I eventually figured outby using Process Explorer that massive DPC usage (80%) whenever Harddrive B (not the OS HD, a seagate HD) was being accessed or used. I tried check disk, but it kept doing nothing at part 4. So I moved everything off of B and formatted it.
For some reason, HD B has 1mb of unallocated space. Anyway, after formatting I am still getting issues when using the HD. I am now even getting 5-15% in DPC when not using this HD, in addition to 29-40% CPU usage on hard ware interupts.

I cant figure out a way to diagnose these problems. I am new to DPCs, and my 64bit processor doesnt seem to work with RATT.

Anybody know a good way to diagnose the problem? If I knew that formatting the comp itself would work I would, but since there appears to be a problem with HD B, I dont know if that would.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

 

Found this by Googling (links directly to a PDF) http://www.thesycon.de/dpclat/dpclat.pdf
and here's a link to the program featured in the above link http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml
Don't know if this helps, it's a bit old but may be helpful http://forum.sysinternals.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=837&PID=17510
and apparently RATTV3 is a Microsoft tool for DPC analysis http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/DevTools/tools/RATT.mspx

Good luck!

 

I already mentioned RATTV3 but it didnt seemed to work, which may be because its a 64bit processor. I'll check that again. DPClat is more for checking what your comp can handle with respect to videos.

I looked through that forum. And found that there is numerous reasons for DPC and hardware interference. I decided to upgrade my nvidia driver, and did so and restarted.
When I restarted my system did a checkdisk of the HD B and it went through (very slowly).

The comp starts and is running fine. No DPC, no interupts. HD B no longer has that 1mb unallocated. Then I do the final test, I transfer some files to HD B. During the transfer I am hitting a combined total of 80%+ CPU usage for interupts and DCP. Thats not all. After the transfer is comple, I am sitting on 40% interupt and 10% DPC.
Its like I have excited the interupts and DCP.