Question : XP Pro reinstall - NTFS Format Crawling. Why???

Hello All,

I am reformatting a eMachines laptop for a friend as he was having a lot of issues with it - boot files corrupted, IE pretty much moving at a snail's pace.. overall system was dead slow. He had windows XP home on it but is moving to XP Pro.Could not do a upgrade as it had corrupt/missing files even after the whole bootcfg, fixboot, fixmbr etc process.  I've done reinstalls many many times before but never had this situation. I was able to boot off the XP Pro CD, and get to the point of FULL formatting the HDD with NTFS. At this point, the install process simply starts to crawl. When I went to bed last night, the format was at 4%. I woke up this morning and it was at 6% (I must mention that I went to bed at 5 am and was up at 8:30am - so 2% in 3 hours 30 mins).

I did not check to see if the BIOS Hdd setting was DMA or PIO - since it had XP Home on it previously, I assumed it was set to DMA. If i get home this evening and the format is still not done, I will kill it and check the BIOS.

Does anyone know why the format is happenning so slow? Is there anything else I can check/do to speed it up?

Thanks a bunch,
VJ
 

Answer : XP Pro reinstall - NTFS Format Crawling. Why???

you are mixing some things :   DMA or PIO settings are in the software, not in the bios
i would test the disk with the manufacturers diag; find the diags here :    http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=287

you probably have a bad disk, or disk controller (= new mobo)
btw, i always start with testing ram, just to be sure about my basics, use memtest86+ from  www.memtest.org, or download the ubcd to run it : http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/