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July 28th, 2004 21:00
Extremely Slow Disk Access Speed (with abnormal disc sounds)
Sir/Madam,
We had an difficult-to-identify incident call for DELL Inspiron 8200, seemingly HDD failure. Would anybody provide with your comments/advices for this technical support:
Today 1420, one client laptop PC (DELL Inspiron 8200, 512 MB SDRAM, 20GB HDD 3 year-old; Windows XP with newest update applied) started abnormally slow. We cleared temporal Internet Files, and Temp Files. Still no effects. Now we scanned with AV software (rendmicro Office Scan) but no virus is infected. Nextly we attempted disk defrag, in vain. Still Windows itself is abnormally slow.
I doubted RAM: but Control Panel>System>General Tub indicates 512MB RAM installed. I rebooted laptop, start-up BIOS menu, and also verified BIOS recognizes 512MB memory. Also processor speed is displayed as 1.2GHz. It appears no problem on RAM and Pentium4 processor.
The HDD is most suspicious: The laptop is emitting abnormal ticking sound of HDD, which is NOT the type of sound crached HDD make, but it is constant ticking sound.
We verified the time: without other application running, starting up Windows Explorer took 6 minutes. But I hoped that it is software failure rather than hardware.
Due to time constraints, we decided to restore the standard disk image using Acronis Disk Image. Windows XP is restored to its standard make, but it is still slow, taking 5 minutes 21 seconds to start up. The HDD sound is also abnormal, emitting constant ticking sounds. (But OS starts up.)
Now I decided that it should be fresh installation from CD: booted up from XP CDROM, and installation speed is abnormally slow. NTFS formatting takes abnormally long duration 46 minutes. File copy (under the blue screen of XP installation) is taking more than 1 hour 30 minutes. Normally the process should be 10-15 minutes.
Since file copy is so slow, with suspicious abnormal ticking sounds, I suspect HDD failure. But would it be more deeper hardware problem, such as chipset failure, or processor failure? If so, replacement PC should be purchased, which deprives time.
Do you think this can be resolved with simply replacing HDD?
ejn63
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July 29th, 2004 00:00
Boot the Dell diagnostics and run a full drive scan including a surface scan. It does sound like the drive is failing.
Doc_X36
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July 29th, 2004 05:00
George VanAssai
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July 29th, 2004 05:00
Sirs,
I appreciate your valuable comments. Since last night I started fresh installation, but copy speed has been so slow, it took 5 hours, and yet finished.
As you suggested, I wished to run DELL diagnostics, but OS is yet recovered.
We have contacted DELL Services, (in fact Getronics NV) to replace HDD. But next time, if I encounter the similar problem, I would run DELL diagnostics first, as you suggested, sir.
Yesterday, I have reported the make of Inspiron: it was Inspiron 8100 (not 8200: sorry for mistake). 8200 is newer version, with larger memory and superiour graphic card.) 1.2 GHz is indeed the full speed. (It is around 3 year-old according to asset list)
Again, thank you for your valuable comments.