Nightmare Harddrive issues

[Teho]

I have a 300GB Maxtor SATA drive (not boot) in my system, on a A8N-E board. Which is nForce4 based. But I have never had any of those issues fortunately. If anything starts to happen though, at least I know where to look first now.

Sorry to hear about your troubles there. Hardware problems is never fun.

[Harrison]

Well, when the Maxtor drive was just connected to the system as an extra drive it didn't cause too many problems. But reading everything I've found I'm now sure it was slowing down the system booting, and causing the odd system pauses I was getting.

I know a new install of Windows always runs much faster than one that's been in use for a long time, but I can't get over how fast the system is again now. And it still is even with everything installed back to how it was before I changed the drives. XP boots in about 10 seconds at the moment! I bet that will change once I install all of my Adobe Font collection again though.

[J T]

I have a 300GB Maxtor SATA drive (not boot) in my system, on a A8N-E board. Which is nForce4 based. But I have never had any of those issues fortunately. If anything starts to happen though, at least I know where to look first now.

Sorry to hear about your troubles there. Hardware problems is never fun.

Similar, I have a 250GB Maxtor, on an A8N-E. It is my boot drive, but back from when I first installed win 2000 it was partioned in two (the old maximum drive capacity thing) and still is.

[Demon Cleaner]

I still have a lot Maxtor drives (although only 1 SATA), also the Diamond Max versions, but never had problems. I remember reading an article about it having problems with the nForce4 boards.

Shame is that you lost a lot of time until you found out the problem, that is why I avoid a new XP install. That are also things that make me go really crazy and go berserk.

[Submeg]

Shame is that you lost a lot of time until you found out the problem, that is why I avoid a new XP install. That are also things that make me go really crazy and go berserk.

Really? You dont like reinstalling windows?

[Harrison]

I would much prefer a completely clean install of any OS, instead of using a mirror of an old install. This is especially true of Windows as the registry can quickly become clogged up with a lot of old data and corrupt keys that can slow down the OS and cause problems. And there is also always a lot of junk left behind in the main Windows and Program File directories over time.

[Demon Cleaner]

I use Registry Mechanic which does a pretty good work on removing obsolete files and much more, plus I tend to clean my registry manually. And as I don't reboot my PC very often (once a month), I don't care if it boots in 10 seconds or in 1 minute.

When my system is still stable and I removed, cleaned, installed something, I just do an incremental backup of the previous one, works fine for me.

[Harrison]

Fair enough.

I think I prefer clean installs because of the software I tend to use that can easily be effected by registry keys and old files left over from older versions of the same software. Plus I tend to only do clean installs once Windows starts to exhibit strange behaviour that cannot be tracked down to specific reasons and easily repaired. For example on my old install of XP the system would sometimes pause for a long time (minutes) after selecting to delete a file, before it actually popped up the box asking if you really want to delete the file. Not sure of the cause of that one.

If I can fix a problem with an OS I will do that rather than wiping it and doing a clean install. It is a last resort for me only if something cannot be easily fixed, or if I'm changing the HD. I think it is better to track down a fix an error so you know what caused it than to just wipe the OS with a clean install and still not know the cause of the original problem.