extremely slow t21, please help

[vertex]

Hello all,

A newbie here with what may be a newb question, but I've searched this forum and can't find anything that really seems to match my situation.

I recently got a T21 (type 2647), and installed windows xp. For the first 2 days, it ran fine. On the 3rd day, I booted up, and it started to load very slowly (about 10 minutes). Once in windows, everything runs extremely slow, and I can here a constant clicking sound from the hard drive, like it's reading the data in bite-sized chunks. I'm not sure if this is directly related to the problem, or if it's just a symptom.

I tried making changes to the bios settings regarding power consumption, with no change. I reset the bios to the default settings, no change.

I swapped hard drives and reloaded xp. Windows xp installation was now taking a very long time.

I'm nearing my wit's end, any help would be great.

[vertex]

BTW, Bios version is 1.11. I went to Lenovo's website, but there wasn't anything in any of the newer Bios versions to suggest that I needed to upgrade. If you know otherwise, please tell me.

[vertex]

Ok, I found this forum thread:

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... ive+access

I checked the device manager, and it did say that the primary ide drive was in PIO mode. I tried rebooting after selecting "DMA if available", but no luck.

I tried to uninstall the primary ide drive, to see if it works. No luck.

I'll keep looking, but would appreciate any feedback.

[Temetka]

It sounds like the HD might be going south. In that case it's a great excuse to pick a nice speedy 5400RPM drive. I don't think the problem lies with the mainboard or with windows device manager. Since you say it was a fresh install, the only other thing I would do before replacing the hard drive is to install the software installer from IBM. This thing will load up your system with all the correct drivers and whatnot.

Good luck.

[vertex]

Hi, thanks for the reply, but that doesn't explain why the second hdd performs the same way.

In addition to this, I've since taken the original hard drive, installed it in my other laptop (Toshiba Tecra 8100), formatted it and installed xp. No issues.

I'm still unable to reset the ide interface to DMA, it's still showing up as PIO.

[tfflivemb2]

Have you checked your task manager to see what is using up your resources?

Also, how much memory are you running on T21, and how much in the 8100?

[dsvochak]

The thread you found refers to this article:
http://www.michna.com/kb/WxDMA.htm
which contains the following:

However, there are a few reasons why a computer may use PIO instead of DMA, particularly when it's the hard disk port that falls back, not a CD/DVD drive port. For example, David Duberman reported in 2005 that some Dell computers have DMA disabled in their BIOS by default for the second hard disk. So it is a good idea to check the BIOS settings first.

Other reasons can show up in the event log, so check this first and see if you can find repeated Atapi errors recorded. If so, you likely have a hardware defect. You can use the procedure described below, but your computer will probably fall back to PIO mode again and again, until you solve the underlying problem, which may be located inside the device, on the motherboard, or in the IDE data cable and its connectors.

The Microsoft article noted in the thread suggests a similar cause. Also, it's not clear in either article whether replacing a failing drive with a known good drive fixes the problem. Which could explain why "...the second hard drive performs the same way".

If the event log shows ATAPI errors, I'd begin with a test of the disk. (And hope that the test shows it's failing instead of the problem being "on the motherboard, or in the IDE data cable and its connectors".)

Good luck.