Need pro hardware help

[killbill]

right, i got a 120GB hard drive in my pc and i put a old maxtor 10gb hard drive my pc and when i boot up it made all wierd beeping noise so i took it out tryed again but this time it only detects the 10gb harddrive so i have to take it out and keep the 120 on its own. But now when i boot up it takes like ten mins to get into windows

[cfisher]

Run chkdsk on the drive, scan for bad sectors. Try any drive fitness tests you can find from the manufacturer's website. You could have very well ruined your drive. But try those things before you believe that all is lost on that drive.

PC Doctor:

http://www.pc-doctor.com/

Hitachi Drive Fitness Test:

http://www.hgst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

And any other related utilities you can find from the drive manufacturer.

[killbill]

i did all them and it seems to be fine, well i have formatted the harddive and it still loads up slow

[cfisher]

You mentioned formatting, if you used the XP CD to perform that, did you wipe out the paritition table and then recreate it before you formatted?

If you used a boot disk to format the drive, did you run fdisk to perform the same procedure mentioned above?

Also if you did use a boot disk, try using:

fdisk /mbr

It will wipe out the entire master boot record, could have some possible corrupted data in there which would cause a lag during boot.

Also, while you're at it, try disconnecting the other devices, such as an expansion card modem, nic card, sound card, and other drives, CD/Floppy, just to make sure none of those are causing a delay in the boot.

[killbill]

I formatted using the windows xp disk, and i did delete the space before i put windows xp on i am really puzzeld

[killbill]

It looks like it was a stick of ram i put in earlier in my pc i have 2 512mb 266Mhz ram sticks and i put a 256MB 166MHz in, do i have to use the same speed ram or should that of worked^

[boyNamedFoo]

Probably be irrelevant but i had 2 hard disks in my system recently sometimes the slave ("second" hard disk) was not recognised by the BIOS and therefore not windows. It turns out the IDE cable I had was damaged in the slave section. I replaced it and it worked fine.

HTH, Steve.