Very slow hard drive on T40

[nickbd]

I have a T40 (out of warranty) and it takes forever to do anything involving disk access. I restored Windows from the restore partition but it is still incredibly slow. The PC Doctor diagnostics picked out a read error and with the Hitach DFT it did find two bad sectors (which I didn't fix) on a Quick scan but then after running the advanced test 10 times it found nothing wrong. Same with the Quick scan. The other diagnostics tests using Access IBM found no problems. I ran CHKDSK and it was OK but took 8 hours instead of a few minutes. Obviously there is something wrong but how do I eliminate the hard drive from the HDD interface or something else used for the HDD. Also is the boot sector checked by the DFT?
Thanks for any help.

[GomJabbar]

Sounds like your hard drive is going out to me. Once when I had a hard drive going out, it took several hours to format. This is much too long.

It's possible you might see some error messages in Event Viewer. Go to Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Event Viewer. Look especially for SMART, or ATAPI errors.

[Kyocera]

Nick, how did you download the DFT? When I tried it wanted to save to a floppy drive and I could not uncheck the option>

[nickbd]

For the Hitach DFT I downloaded the ISO file and made a bootable CD. The SMART also had no error codes so I think if the drive were having trouble with reads it would place a code there. I ran the PC Doctor diagnostics again and the harddrive and everything else was fine.
Nick

[nickbd]

I took drive out and put it back, then ran the DFT for about 3 hours and drive was fine. Then decided to check BIOS and set it to default. After that everything was fine so maybe the BIOS was messed up. Can't imagine taking the drive in and out would matter. If there was a bad contact that affected the data transfer the DFT would have picked it up. Thanks for the advice with this problem.