Hard Disk Drive Problems: How to Fix IDE PATA and SATA Hard Disk Drive (HDD) Problems - Page 1

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HARD DISK DRIVE PROBLEMS - PAGE 1

The questions and answers (Q&As) on hard disk drive problems on this website are linked to below the following useful information.

MHDD is the most popular freeware program for low-level hard-disk-drive diagnostics. - http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/

Visit the Disk Drives section of this site for information on internal and external hard disk drives and CD/DVD drives/writers.

Click the relevant link below to go to that Q&A article. Use your browser's Back button to backtrack.

1. - Information on the most common hard disk drive problems in the Microsoft Knowledge Base

2. - Some of the most common hard disk drive problems...

A. - Why I can only create four partitions on my hard drive? - B. - Windows can only see 137GB of my 250GB IDE hard drive - C. - I partitioned and formatted my new hard drive, but a message just says there's no operating system - D. - I ran benchmark tests on my IDE hard drive, which say that the drive isn't running at full speed - E. - A problem with an old IDE hard drive and a new SATA drive running from a PCI SATA adapter card.

3. - My HP desktop PC's hard disk drive has a C: boot partition and a D: Recovery partition. How can I delete the D: drive and make the C: drive fill the unallocated disk space?

4. - I have a Windows 7 desktop PC and I want to know how to add a second hard disk drive and install Windows XP on it

5. - I can't erase/delete files on my external USB hard disk drive

6. - Changing from IDE to AHCI mode in the system BIOS made Windows XP/Vista and Windows 7 produce a blue screen of death (BSOD)

7. - I can't copy 6GB master image backup files of my PC/computer to a USB external hard disk drive or to a USB flash drive

8. - My desktop PC runs Windows Vista/Windows 7. How can I install Windows XP on an external eSATA or USB-connected hard disk drive without having to reinstall Windows?

9. - I have to start, restart, shut down and restart my computer to get it to boot properly and Windows Vista reports corrupt hard disk segments and Registry files

10. - My PC reboots by itself and warnings have appeared asking me to run Chkdsk, the Windows XP/Vista/Windows 7 hard-disk-drive diagnostic utility

11. - Chkdsk, the hard-disk-drive checking and repair diagnostic utility in Windows XP/Vista/Windows 7, is "Unable to read security descriptors"

12. - My computer/PC is giving loads of disk error messages. What do they mean and how can I get rid of them?

13. - A constant "disk boot failure" error message: What is it and what can I do to fix it?

14. - Windows Disk Diagnostics: Windows Vista Premium reports that my PC's hard disk drive is faulty and is about to fail

15. - Can I install/mix IDE PATA and SATA hard disk drives in the same computer/PC and in a RAID array?

16. - Will a backup copy/image created by Norton Ghost on a second hard disk drive be bootable when the drive is installed as the boot drive?

17. - The Windows XP Disk Defragmenter won't go all the way: Defrag stops at 12%

18. - I can't access my files in a user account protected by a password on a hard disk drive that was installed in another PC running Windows XP

19. - If I connect an SATA hard drive to my PC, it won't boot. It gives error message "hal.dll is corrupted"

20. - When I install Windows XP on an SATA hard drive and then reboot, the setup program asks me if I want to begin the setup all over again

21. - I can't find out if DMA is enabled for my hard drive in Windows XP/Windows Vista/Windows 7

22. - In Windows XP, the boot drive is F: instead of C: - How can I change the boot drive's letter back to C:?

23. - My external hard disk drive is not recognised (US: recognized) by my PC

24. - When booting my PC/computer I can't have my external USB 2.0 hard drive turned on or else I get the message "Invalid system disk, please replace"

25. - How do I install, partition and format an external USB/eSATA hard disk drive in Windows XP/Vista?

26. - How can I format an external USB hard drive in Windows XP without having to make it the C: drive?

27. - My external USB hard disk drive has shrunk from 60GB to only 3GB after using Paragon Hard Disk Manager. - How can I recover the lost space?

28. - File systems: How to convert from the FAT32 file system to NTFS

29. - My PC runs the hard disk drive in UDMA 33 mode instead of UDMA 100 mode AND In Windows XP, how can I change the UDMA mode from the reported mode 5 to the actual mode 6 that my motherboard supports?

30. - Every time I start my PC up the IDE hard disk drive is checked for consistency

31. - Experiencing a system slow-down or a 'thrashing' hard disk drive, the LED light for which flashes showing constant activity?

Chkdsk, the hard-disk-drive checking and repair diagnostic utility in Windows XP/Vista/Windows 7, is "Unable to read security descriptors"

Problem

When Windows XP boots, it runs the Chkdsk hard-drive utility automatically, which did not used to happen when my PC started up. Chkdsk stops working, and an error message saying: "Unable to read security descriptors" come up. Windows XP can boot past this error message, but another error message comes up that contains Windows\system32\Nvcpl.dll. I have scanned the system with Norton Antivirus, Trend's free online virus scanner, and Microsoft Security Essentials, all fully-updated, but they found nothing.

Answer

The Chkdsk hard-drive diagnostic and repair utility that is part of Windows XP (it is also available in Windows Vista and Windows 7 largely unchanged) can be used with any of the latest large hard disk drives. Click here! to go directly to information on it in the Recovering Windows XP page on this site. Use your browser's Back button to return here.

A Google search found that Nvcpl.dll is part of your nVidia video/graphics card's drivers. To find out what happens yourself, you can try entering the file name in the Google search box at the top of this page, with its Web radio button enabled.

Downloading the latest driver file from http://www.nvidia.com/, removing the old drivers by using Add or Remove Programs in the Control Panel, installing the standard Windows VGA driver by using the Update Driver option for the named video card under Display adapters in the Device Manager (by right-clicking with the mouse pointer on the entry for the video card), and then installing the latest nVidia driver file for the video card, might remedy the situation, but, unfortunately the problem is probably the result of a corruption of the setup on the hard disk drive.

There is probably something seriously amiss with the New Technology File System (NTFS) being used by the hard disk drive. If Chkdsk - the equivalent of the ScanDisk utility in Windows 9.x systems - can't fix it, then I don't know of a tool that can fix it - safely.

Usually the only solution is to reformat the hard disk drive and reinstall Windows. Unfortunately, there may be physical damage to the drive, such as bad sectors. Note that if your desktop or laptop PC came with a Recovery CD/DVD (or uses a recovery partition on the hard drive that contains the backup files) instead of a Windows XP/Vista/Windows 7 CD/DVD, you will have to format the drive that has Windows installed on it (usually the C: drive) and then use the Recovery CD/DVD according to the instructions provided by the PC's manufacturer.

A security descriptor is an entry in the NTFS that describes the owner of a file or folder, and the permissions (set in Windows) that are associated with it. Damage to these descriptors would make all of the files, or part of them, inaccessible on the hard disk drive.

If this is the case and you want to save the inaccessible data, the best option would be to read the files with software that can ignore the security features in Windows.

This can be done by using a version of Linux that can be booted from its CD/DVD. Ubuntu Linux from http://www.ubuntu.com/ can be downloaded as an ISO file which can be burned to CD that becomes fully bootable. You can use this distribution of Linux from the CD/DVD without ever installing it on the hard drive. It should install the device drivers for the motherboard, video card, sound card, USB devices, and the hard drive from the CD/DVD. If you use a wireless router to access the web it will also allow you to access the web if you enter any security encryption key that is protecting the network.

Boot disks of the above-mentioned kind can use the NTFS file system, and therefore allow you to access the folders and files in Windows. The following how-to article shows you how to use Ubuntu Linux to go about it.

How To: Reading Files From Windows Partition(NTFS) in Ubuntu Linux -

http://www.obharath.net/blog/2005/10/05/reading-files-from-windows-partitionntfs-on-ubuntu-linux/

If there aren't too many, a handy way to save files would be to save them to a USB flash drive (memory stick) that can have 2GB, 4GB, 8GB, 16GB and 32GB from Kingston, SanDisk, Lexar, Transcend and MyMemory. Or, if there are too many files to make use of that method, if you have a separate CD-writer, use Linux to burn them to recordable CD/DVDs. You could also install another hard disk drive and copy the files to it or make use of an external USB hard disk drive.

Norton Ghost has an option that works with some damaged drives. It is a DOS-based program that can run from a floppy disk - if your PC has a floppy disk drive, which many new PC no longer have. You would use it to copy the files from an NTFS partition to another hard disk drive. But beware, because it may copy the corrupted part of the NTFS (file system) that is preventing access to the data in the first place.

If the problem with the hard disk drive was caused by physical damage, having recovered any data, you would have to trash the drive. But, if the problem was caused by a corrupt NTFS, you would be able to keep the drive in use after the drive has been reformatted and Windows XP has been reinstalled from its CD, not from a system backup, because it may also have copied the corrupt part of the NTFS.

My computer/PC is giving loads of disk error messages. What do they mean and how can I get rid of them?

Problem

My desktop PC runs Windows XP SP2 and it is giving me loads of disk error messages. As it starts up, the Windows XP logo with its animated blue bar comes up as usual, but then a blue screen comes up that wants me to run Chkdsk - XP's hard-drive diagnostic utility. After that, a countdown begins and Chkdsk runs (1 of 3 tests). When it gets to 100%, it fills the screen with a repeated line saying: "Inserting an index entry into $0 of file 25", which runs non-stop, so I have to shut the PC down. Then I restart it and choose the option that prevents Chkdsk from running, but I still get the error messages. However, I can close them and log on while closing any other error messages. The first error message is: "WINLOGON.EXE - corrupt file" and it is followed by "The file or directory \$Extend\$Objld is corrupt and unreadable. Please run the Chkdsk utility." All of the other error messages name the same file, but have a different header. Is there a fix for this highly annoying problem, or does my PC need a new hard disk drive?

Answer

The $Extend\$Objld is a meta-data file; a special hidden file that the NTFS file system uses to store file-system information. (The NTFS file system is the one that Windows XP/Vista uses.) For those of you who might be interested in the technical details, it is found in position 24 or 25 of the boot hard disk drive's Master File Table and contains an index to the unique object identifier numbers that NTFS allocates to every file on the computer. The index is not essential, because Windows can still be used with the alternative FAT32 file system, but if the hard disk drive's C: (boot) drive/partition has been formatted to use the NTFS file system, there is no way that it can be turned off.

$Extend\$Objld contains an index to every file on the drive, so it is large. If it is damaged, it usually takes Windows Chkdsk a long time to rebuild it - perhaps 12 hours or more of "inserting an index entry into index $0 of file 25". As you have discovered, you can wait for it to complete its task or choose to interrupt it. If you interrupt it, it will run again when the computer is restarted. You can, of course, press the key that prevents the disk check again.

The computer runs properly without the $Extend\$Objld file and you can use the chkntfs command at the Command Prompt to prevent Windows from running Chkdsk at startup. To do that, gain access to the Start => Run box and enter cmd to bring up the Command Prompt. Enter the command chkntfs. However, doing that is not advisable, because it could lead to serious disk corruption.

The initial corruption of the $Extend\$Objld file could have been brought about by a power interruption while the NTFS file system was updating the file, or it could be a sign of impending hard-disk-drive failure.

The measures you can take to discover the cause of the problem are:

Download the diagnostic utility that the hard-drive manufacturer provides from its website, and use it to perform a complete test of the drive. If you don't know the make/model of the drive, open the Device Manager by entering devmgmt.msc in the Start => Run box and open Disk drives. You can then enter the make/model number in the Google search box at the top of this page (with its Web radio button enabled) to locate the manufacturer's website. There is a table at the top of this page that provides information on where to download the hard-disk-drive diagnostic utilities for a particular major make of hard drive. Alternatively, click here! to go to information on this site on the diagnostic utilities provided by the major hard-drive manufacturers.

Note that some hard disk drives - certain makes of laptop/notebook PC hard-drives in particular - can suffer from random lockups, or develop areas of the drive that become slow for the drive to access. Those areas of the drive may not be revealed by the diagnostics utility provided by the drive's manufacturer. However, they can often be detected by MHDD, which is a free diagnostic utility from http://hddguru.com/.

It is possible that the $Extend\$Objld file can become so fragmented that updating it can take a long time. This will usually only happen if some of the drive's sectors are very slow to access, which itself suggests that the drive is suffering from physical problems. Problems can be caused if the computer is shut down before the updating has finished. The Windows Disk Defragmenter (Defrag) cannot defragment the file because of its special system status. It won't defragment a system file. Nor can third-party defragmentation utilities, such as PageDefrag, defragment it.

If the diagnostic utilities don't discover any physical problems with the drive and the problem occurs repeatedly, the only possible solution is to reformat the entire partition of the drive. If you don't know how to do that click here! to go to relevant information on this site.

A constant "disk boot failure" error message: What is it and how can I fix it?

Problem

My new Windows Vista desktop PC is giving me a "disk boot failure" error message each day when I try to boot it up. What does this mean exactly? It appears, with rare exceptions, only when the PC is started each morning. Once or twice in the six weeks since I purchased the computer, the error did not appear. If I shut the PC down and restart it, everything appears to run properly. I've run diagnostics on all the hardware, followed the recommendations on the HP site to correct this error, run chkdsk and talked to HP tech support. The only course of action left is to wipe my hard drive and run the system recovery CD. Before doing that, I need to know if there is anything else I can try.

Answer

Since your PC is still under warranty, you could insist that the seller gets it fixed for you or replaces it. However, if you don't want the hassle that is always involved, here are some simple measures to take to resolve the issue:

I have seen quite a few problems with the older IDE 40-pin hard-drive cables, and the new SATA cables. Their fragile-looking connectors look like a potential cause of problems such as yours. These cables are very cheap, and, although HP should fix it all under warranty, the hassle often is not worth it. If you can replace the hard disk drive's data cable, you will save yourself all the hassle of having to reload all of your data and programs again.

I found this answer on the web that provides the most likely solution:

"I had a problem similar to yours, did a lot of digging on Google and got lots of advice, ran a bunch of diagnostics and could not find any problems. I thought my drive was ready to fail, so I looked into replacing it. But I happened to have a spare SATA cable lying around, and for the heck of it, tried replacing the cable. Since then, I've had no problems! My advice - before you buy a new hard drive, buy a replacement cable and see if that makes a difference. You might save yourself lots of $$$, like I did!"

Your action plan should be:

1. - Save/backup your email, documents and pictures, and music.

2. - Don't bother trying to backup your programs, because they usually need to be installed, not just copied back.

3. - Unplug the AC mains cable so the computer is not powered on. Replace the hard drive cable, or, at least, unplug it and then re-plug it. If the power supply unit has a spare 4-pin power lead (with yellow, black, black, red), then unplug the power connector from the hard drive and swap it. If there is no replacement available then unplug and re-plug the drive's power connector.

If doing that doesn't work, you could try running the hard-drive diagnostic utility that is provided by the drive's manufacturer. There is a list of links to the sites of the main manufacturer's provided at the top of this page. You should be able to identify the manufacturer by entering devmgmt.msc in the Start => Run box in Windows XP and in the Start => Start Search box in Windows Vista. That command brings up the Device Manager. Look under the Disk drives category by clicking on the + beside it.

If the hard disk drive is shown to be failing, make copies to recordable CD/DVDs of everything that you want to save, and then go through the process involved that will get your PC fixed by its manufacturer under its warranty.

Windows Disk Diagnostics: Windows Vista Premium reports that my PC's hard disk drive is faulty and is about to fail

Problem

I have upgraded my Windows XP desktop PC to Windows Vista Premium Edition. Having formatted the C: drive, the clean installation went well until I had to choose the drive on which to install Vista. The drive had a yellow warning triangle beside it and a message appeared saying that the hard disk drive was faulty and about to fail. Since the drive was purchased brand new in January 2008, I thought that it was a false warning and installed Vista. After a few hours, Vista produced a warning message saying that the drive was failing and that I should back up my data. The message made an appearance a few more times over the next few hours. After the last appearance, I was given the option to disable it, which I did. Is the drive faulty? If so, will I be able to send it back to the online store I bought it from?

Answer

One of the new diagnostic features that Windows Vista has is called Windows Disk Diagnostics. Most recent hard drives have an inbuilt feature called SMART, which stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology. Windows Disk Diagnostics just reports what SMART is reporting about the drive's status.

A hard drive that uses SMART monitors itself for symptoms of impending failure, such as a high number of attempts to read data, or a higher-than-normal temperature. In approximately half of the cases, SMART drives fail without providing any advanced warning. Unfortunately, SMART has also been known to start giving warnings long before the actual failure occurs.

In any case, Windows Vista checks a SMART drive's status once an hour and records any problems in its Event log. You can use the Event Viewer to look through the log files to find out why the warning messages were produced.

Windows Vista's Help and Support has this to say about the Event Viewer:

"Using Event Viewer - Event Viewer maintains logs about program, security, and system events on your computer. You can use Event Viewer to view and manage the event logs, gather information about hardware and software problems, and monitor Windows security events.

"To open Event Viewer, click Start, click Control Panel, double-click Administrative Tools, and then double-click Event Viewer. For information about using Event Viewer, in Event Viewer, on the Action menu, click Help."

The BIOS setup program of most motherboards has a setting that makes it check the drive's SMART status at system startup. For some unknown and peculiar reason, it is usually turned off by default, so it is advisable to enable it. Visit the BIOS section of this site if you don't know how to access the BIOS.

Just to make sure that the drive is faulty, you can download a diagnostic program from the drive's manufacturer's website. All of the drive manufacturers provide such a utility. If you don't know what the drive's manufacturer is, you can find out (without having to open the PC's case and remove the drive) by entering the command devmgmt.msc in the Start => Start Search box (Start => Run box in Windows XP). Doing that opens the Device Manager. Click the + beside Disk drives. If the manufacturer's device drivers are installed, you will find that the make and model of the hard drive is listed there. If Windows has installed it hard-drive device drivers, you'll see standard Windows entries.

If the manufacturer's diagnostic utility also says that the drive is faulty, you should replace it before it dies.

You bought a brand-name PC, so its hard drive is still under its statutory 12-month warranty (the whole PC has a 12-month statutory warranty). You should be able to get a replacement, because the drive manufacturers replace any drive that gives SMART warnings. Visit the online store's website to find out what its returns policies and procedures are. However, if you had bought a boxed retail product, the warranty can be up to five years depending on the manufacturer. Each of the hard drive manufacturers has its own warranty policy, so, if that is the case, visit the manufacturer's site to find out what that policy is.

Note that under the Sale of Goods Act in the UK, you have the right to a replacement of faulty goods, regardless of the statutory warranty, if those goods rendered themselves unusable - failed on their own accord without any assistance from their user(s) - before a reasonable period of useful life, which would probably be five years for a hard disk drive, because that is the warranty period given for the retail boxed product by most hard-drive manufacturers.

Can I install/mix IDE PATA and SATA hard disk drives in the same computer/PC and in a RAID array?

Question

My desktop PC has a Gigabtye GA-P35C-DS3R motherboard and a Samsung Spinpoint SATA hard disk drive. The motherboard supports RAID. I have an older IDE PATA hard disk drive taken from another PC that I don't want to waste. Is it possible to mix SATA and PATA drives in an internal RAID configuration? Also, is it possible to install the PATA drive in an external hard disk enclosure via a USB port?

Answer

You can install the older IDE PATA hard drive internally because the Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R motherboard has one residual IDE PATA port that can connect two IDE hard drives or one hard drive and one IDE CD/DVD drive. (You can find reviews of this motherboard by entering its make and model in the Google search box at the top of this page with its Web radio button enabled.)

There are no eSATA ports on the Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R motherboard, instead it comes with a dual eSATA bracket that connects an internal SATA header on the motherboard to the bracket that fits into a slot at the back of the case. Therefore, you can use an external eSATA/USB 2.0 external hard-drive enclosure that fits an IDE PATA drive and use it as an external drive.

However, you cannot use an external or an internal IDE PATA drive with an internal SATA drive in a RAID array. This motherboard supports RAID, but all motherboard RAID controllers require that all of the drives in a RAID array should have the same kind of interface and preferably all have the same amount of disk space. If there are differences in the amount of disk space in the drives, the array will be based on the smallest drive's disk space and excess space on the larger drives will be unusable.

When PATA and SATA hard drives are installed on a motherboard, the BIOS Setup Program determines which of them is bootable (starts the system up). With some BIOS Setup Programs, all RAID controllers are set up as SCSI controllers, even though no SCSI hard drives are being used. On some motherboards it is not possible to change the boot order. If that is the case, and both PATA and SATA drives are installed, some motherboards always boot from the PATA drive and others always boot from the SATA drive. For more information on this, read the motherboard's manual. If you don't have a copy, download one for that model from Gigabyte's website: http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/.

It is a better option to use a file-synchronisation program, such as Fileback-PC from http://www.fileback-pc.com/, or a backup program, such as AIS Backup from http://www.aiscl.co.uk/ to create and maintain a mirror drive than it is to use a RAID mirror option. Both of those products can save previous versions of files so that, if the latest copies are damaged, earlier versions can be restored.

Click here! to go to the information on RAID on this site.

Will a backup copy/image created by Norton Ghost on a second hard disk drive be bootable when the drive is installed as the boot drive?

Question

My beloved home-built PC runs Windows XP Home and has two IDE ATA 160GB hard drives installed. I use Norton Ghost 2003 to create an image of the boot drive on the second drive on a regular basis. Then, if the main drive fails for some reason, I plan to replace the failed drive with the drive that has the image of the system on it. However, I can't find out how to install the boot files to the second drive that would make it bootable. With Windows 98, there was an option to format the drive and install the system files that would make it bootable, but Windows XP doesn't provide that option.

Answer

Windows XP makes any hard drive potentially bootable by default (you don't have to make the choice), so if you use the default options in Norton Ghost, the image should also be bootable, because it is an exact clone of the imaged drive. To boot the system from the drive with the image on it, you should just have to connect it to the same IDE connector on the motherboard that the present drive is connected to.

However, things can go wrong, so it is best to test the image by attempting to boot from it.

How the boot process works in Windows XP

To understand what can go wrong, you have to understand how the boot process works.

In Windows XP, the BIOS setup program loads the data on the first sector of the drive installed as the master drive on the primary IDE connector on the motherboard. There is a primary and a secondary IDE connector.

Note that if a computer has a combination of different types of drive controller (IDE, SATA, SCSI, or PCI adapter cards for IDE or SATA drives), the first controller is usually determined by an option setting in the BIOS. Most current motherboards (the time of writing is June, 2006) have a BIOS option that can make an external USB hard drive the first bootable drive.

That is not the case with your setup. You only have two IDE drives that use the IDE controller on the motherboard, so merely replacing the drives should make the drive with the image bootable.

To be bootable, a hard drive must have at least one primary partition, which must be marked as active. This is usually the case unless you formatted the drive and chose the Extended instead of the Primary option as the partition type, in which case the drive will never be bootable.

Moreover, if a drive contains more than one partition (the PC manufacturer might have added a partition that contains recovery files or utilities), make sure that the partition with Windows installed on it is the active one. To do that open Disk Management by entering diskmgmt.msc in the Start => Run box (or go Start => All Programs => Administrative Tools => Computer Management => Disk Management).

The boot drive, which is usually the C: drive, should be described as Healthy (System). If another drive is active, it has the description Healthy (Active). Non-active drives are just described as Healthy. With only one operating system installed, only the system drive will boot. Your second drive should be an active drive that will become a system drive when it is installed as the master drive on the primary IDE connector. If you have the drive set as a slave drive on the secondary IDE connector, make sure that the drive is jumpered to make it the master drive. Visit this Build a PC page on this site if you need to know how to install a hard drive with the master/slave or Cable Select methods.

The data on the first sector of the drive contains the Master Boot Record, which, when accessed, finds and loads the boot sector of the active partition. The boot sector looks for and loads the hidden file called NTLDR, which loads the NTDETECT.COM file (also hidden; a search for those files won't locate them), which then uses a file called Boot.ini to locate the operating system (Windows XP).

Note that if you don't want the system files to be hidden, open Folder Options in the Control Panel, open the View tab and enable the option called Show hidden files and folders.

How does the boot-sector code locate the NTLDR file when the operating system (Windows XP), which usually handles finding files has not yet loaded?

There is a small amount of code in the boot sector that can't handle the complex NTFS file system that is native to Windows XP, so it is programmed to search a fixed location on the drive. Unfortunately, when Microsoft's programmers wrote the boot sector program, they used cylinders, drive heads (which search the disk) and sectors of the drive as reference points. This was the way in which floppy disk drives and the earliest hard disk drives in the late 1970s described locations on a hard drive. Cylinders, drive heads, and sectors are no longer used to locate points on a drive, because a system called Logical Block Addressing (LBA) is used instead. Therefore, in order to make the two addressing systems work together, the hard drive and the BIOS create a fictional division of the drive space into cylinders and heads. However, the number of heads and cylinders is determined by the particular BIOS and hard-drive firmware being used. Therefore, if you change the motherboard, you change the BIOS, or if you change the drive, you change the firmware. If the compromise between the two addressing systems is changed, the cylinders, heads, and sectors shown in the Master Boot Record won't agree with the information in the boot sector, and they must be made to match each other. This can be rectified by repartitioning the drive.

Fortunately, you can fix the problem more easily if your computer has a floppy disk drive, which many current PCs no longer have. You format a floppy disk using Windows XP by right-clicking on the A: drive in My Computer with the disk inserted, and then choose Format.... Then open Windows Explorer, click on the C: drive, and copy the following files to it, which are in the root directory (C:\): NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM, and Boot.ini.

Note that if the computer has an SCSI or some other non-standard drive controller that the BIOS does not support, you must copy the device driver for that controller to the floppy disk and then rename it ntbootdd.sys.

Next, boot the system with the floppy disk. You may have to set the floppy disk drive as the first boot device in the BIOS. The operating system on the drive will be loaded from its location after the relevant information has been accessed in the Boot.ini file.

The Boot.ini file provides the location of the operating system, which is Windows XP. In Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Windows XP, the file specifies from which drive on which controller the operating system should be loaded. This makes it possible to install those versions of Windows on any partition of any drive, using any controller, even though the first stages of the boot process will always use the master hard drive installed on the primary drive controller.

Since you have two IDE (PATA) drives, the drive containing the Norton Ghost image contains a copy of the boot drive's Boot.ini file, so you can just remove the failed drive and replace it with the drive with the image on it. It must be set as the master drive, or installed properly using the Cable Select method. However, if someone has two different types of drive, such as an IDE drive and an SATA drive, you can try changing the boot order in the BIOS (make SATA the first boot option if the image is on an SATA drive), or try editing the information in the Boot.ini file.

The Recovery Console has a bootcfg /rebuild command that locates the operating system and modifies the Boot.ini file automatically. Click here! to go to the page that contains information about it on this site.

Note that Windows XP will not boot from the image unless it has the same drive letter as the original boot drive. This is not an issue with the DOS-based versions of Windows - Windows 95/98/Me - because the active partition on the primary drive is always given the letter C:, but Windows XP handles removable drives differently by giving a drive the same drive letter every time it is connected. This can make strange things happen when copying/imaging from one drive to another. For example, it is common to find, having performed a repair installation of Windows XP in order to put things right after a backup of the system has been restored, that the system drive has become drive E: because Windows is programmed to think that the C: drive already exists.

The change of drive letter from C: to E: (or any other letter) shouldn't prevent Windows XP from booting properly, because it reads the path to the system drive from a variable that is set during the boot process. Unfortunately, Microsoft's programmers could be sloppy and have often used the letter the that the system was installed on instead of the variable, which means that Windows XP won't work properly unless the drive that contains the copy is allocated the same drive letter as the original drive.

If you want the copy to be given the same drive letter as the original drive (usually C:), make sure that you use the option to clone the drive in Norton Ghost, not the other options for copying data drives, because the other options won't copy the serial number that is set when a drive partition is formatted. This is because the drive letter is assigned in the Windows Registry according to the drive serial number. You are going to replace the failed drive with the drive containing the image so you won't have two drives installed that have identical serial numbers. In any case, although technically illegal, it isn't usually a problem to have two drives installed with identical serial numbers. Windows XP will make the boot drive the C: drive and then allocate another drive letter to any other hard drive that is installed.

The Windows XP Disk Defragmenter won't go all the way: Defrag stops at 10%, 12%

Problem

My computer won't run the Windows Disk Defragmenter all the way. It's the first time I've had a problem with it. It gets to about 12%, stops and produces a message that says some files cannot be defragmented. I am running Windows XP Home SP2. The last software I installed was jv16 Power Tools - the paid-for edition - and I used it to clean the Registry.

Answer

In Windows 95/98/Me, startup programs were the cause of most such failures, but the Disk Defragmenter (Defrag) in Windows XP isn't usually bothered by startup programs running in the background. I would say that there is either a problem with the hard drive itself, or some open or in-use file is getting in its way, or a security tool is preventing Defrag from moving a system file, perhaps because it recognises it as malware.

To check the C: drive deeply enough, run Chkdsk in Thorough mode, To do that open My Computer, right click on the C: drive, and select Properties => Tools. Click Error checking => Check Now... and place check marks in both check boxes by clicking in them with the mouse pointer. Click Start. A message saying that the disk check cannot be performed in normal Windows mode offers to run Chkdsk during a reboot. Choose Yes, and then reboot the PC to allow Chkdsk to run during the startup process. Because the process takes a long time, the best time to do this is when you are not using the PC for several hours, or run it overnight. When the process is finished successfully, it means that the drive itself is all right. Reboot the PC again, and start pressing the F8 key as the startup begins. Press the key quite a few times in order to catch the moment when Windows is looking for that keystroke. The F8 key interrupts the normal boot process and presents you with a boot menu that includes Safe Mode, which you should select. In Safe Mode, Windows XP runs its most basic configuration that makes troubleshooting possible, because none of the higher functions are loaded. If any antivirus or other security programs are running in Safe Mode, disable them temporarily. To run Defrag from the command line, click Start => Run, and enter defrag c: in the Run box. This activates the most basic version of Disk Defragmenter which has no graphical interface. Defrag should now defragment the whole C: drive. Afterwards, reactivate the security programs, and restart the PC.

I can't access files in a user account protected by a password on a hard disk drive that was installed in another PC running Windows XP

Problem

When the power supply on my ex PC failed it took the motherboard and the processor with it to component heaven. (I can't tell you how much it hurt me to have to bin them.) I built a new computer - new power supply, motherboard, processor, memory, hard drive. I installed the old hard disk drive, which was found to be working, in a USB enclosure in order to use it as a backup drive, but I also have many gigabytes of music and images on the drive that I want to recover. Unfortunately, the files are in a user account that is protected by a password, so I am unable to access them. Is there any way that can be done?

Answer

When a password is set for a user account, Windows XP provides an option to make its files private. With NTFS as the file system, right-clicking on a folder, and clicking Sharing and Security allows you the option to make that folder private. The option is there if FAT32 is the file system, but it can't be enabled. Making files private in those ways sets NTFS security permissions that prevents them from being accessed by other users. You must have made the files private.

Because NTFS uses a combination of the username and a unique Security Identifier (SID) key that is created when you install Windows XP, even if you use the same username, the file system security in the new installation of Windows identifies the files as belonging to a different user, so it won't allow you to access them.

Fortunately, Windows XP allows you to change the ownership easily. How this is done depends on the version of Windows XP is being used.

In Windows XP Professional Edition, open Windows Explorer (right-click Start => Explore) click on Tools => Folder Options => View tab, and turn Simple File Sharing off (use your mouse to uncheck the option called Use simple file sharing (Recommended) and click Apply.

If you have Windows XP Home Edition, you must first start the PC in Safe Mode by repeatedly pressing the F8 key after the memory count and just before Windows itself starts to install itself. Log in as the Administrator. That account is shown only in Safe Mode and usually has no password. Open Windows Explorer. Right-clicking on a folder should present an option called Sharing and Security. Click on it and then click on the Security tab of the window that presents itself. Next, click on Advanced => Ownership, select the group entry for Administrators and place a check mark with the mouse in the box called Change ownership on sub-containers and objects, and click on Apply. If a message come up saying that it needs to reset permissions, click OK. All of the files should now be accessible to you.

In Windows XP the boot drive is F: instead of C: - How can I change the boot drive's letter back to C:?

Problem

1. - My hard drive failed irrecoverably and I reinstalled everything on a new hard drive, but unfortunately I left my USB card reader installed. So, now the hard drive is drive F: because the reader is drive C: and D: and the CD/DVD drive is drive E:. It's not a major problem, but it does cause problems with some software, such as Spybot Search & Destroy, because it wants to check the C: drive. I work around it by unplugging the USB card reader.

2. - I have Windows XP Pro installed on my desktop PC's on the C: and F: drives. I use C: for everyday computing and F: as a digital-audio workstation. A normal startup defaults to F:. How can I change that to C:? Also, the boot menu at startup gives me the choices of booting to "Microsoft Windows XP Professional" or to "Microsoft Windows XP Professional." Is it possible to rename the two installations of WinXP Pro for easy identification?"

Answer

Changing the drive-letter assignments for actual additional hard drives installed in a system or non-boot partitions that Windows gives a drive letter is usually easy, but changing the boot drive's letter, which is usually the C: drive, is more involved, because the installed software has usually been installed to work from it. When users install software, they usually accept the default location for the installation, which is under the Program Files folder on the C: drive. But in this case, Windows itself has changed the drive letter of the boot drive from C: to F:, so it would also have changed its program references that point the programs to the C: drive to the F: drive. You therefore need to know how to restore the C: drive as the boot drive.

Read this MS Knowledge Base article: How to restore the system/boot drive letter in Windows at http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=223188.

The article applies to Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Professional Edition, not to the earlier versions of Windows (95/98/98SE/Me).

"This article describes how to change the system or boot drive letter in Windows. For the most part, this is not recommended, especially if the drive letter is the same as when Windows was installed. The only time that you may want to do this is when the drive letters get changed without any user intervention. This may happen when you break a mirror volume or there is a drive configuration change. This should be a rare occurrence and you should change the drive letters back to match the initial installation."

This Google search should produce many more links that provide relevant information: http://www.google.com/search?q=assign+drive+letters+xp.

Answering question 2. above. - Microsoft Knowledge Base article 306559, which has a section called Specifying the Default Operating System for Startup - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306559/en-uk.

You can also edit the boot.ini file to distinguish between the two installations of Windows XP Pro. Click Start => Control Panel => System => Advanced tab, then click the Settings button in the Startup and Recovery section of that window. In the System Startup area of the new window, click the Edit button. A window opens showing the contents of the boot.ini file. It looks like this on my computer:

; ;Warning: Boot.ini is used on Windows XP and earlier operating systems. ;Warning: Use BCDEDIT.exe to modify Windows Vista boot options. ; [boot loader] timeout=30 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /FASTDETECT /NoExecute=OptIn

My computer only has one installation of Win XP Pro. Yours has two. You have to change the words in red above ("Microsoft Windows XP Professional") to whatever you think best describes that boot option. You must leave the quotation marks in place and leave everything else unedited. Whatever is entered between the quotation marks will be displayed on the startup boot menu.

If I connect an SATA hard drive to my PC, it won't boot. It gives error message "hal.dll is corrupted"

Problem

I have Windows XP Pro installed on an IDE hard drive. Everything works fine, but if I connect an SATA drive to the PC, it won't boot. It gives this error message: "hal.dll is corrupted" - I have tried reinstalling Windows with no luck. The same thing happens with or without SP2 installed. - Strangely enough, the PC boots from a CD if BIOS is set to use the CD/DVD drive as the first boot device and the Windows XP installation CD is in the drive at startup.

Answer

The first action to take is to enter the BIOS setup program. If necessary, click here! to go to information on the BIOS on this site.

The SATA and RAID settings are usually in the section of the BIOS called Integrated Peripherals. Here are the settings in the Phoenix Award BIOS of an MSI K8N SLI Platinum motherboard:

OnBoard Sil3132 RAID - This setting controls the onboard Sil3132 RAID chip. Setting options: [Enabled], [Disabled].

OnBoard Sil3132 Mode - This setting allows you to select the Onboard Sil3132 mode. Setting options: [SATA], [RAID].

SATA1/SATA2 & SATA3/SATA4 - This item is used to enable or disable onchip SATA controller. The settings are: [Enabled], [Disabled].

nVidiaRAID Config - Press to enter the sub-menu and the following items appear:

RAID Enabled - This item is used to enable/disable the onchip RAID function. When you set to enable and the following fields will be selectabled. Setting options: [Enabled], [Disabled].

IDE Primary/ Secondary Master/Slave RAID - This feature allows users to enable or disable the RAID function for each IDE hard disk drive. Settings: [Enabled], [Disabled].

SATA1/ SATA2/ SATA3/ SATA4 RAID - This feature allows users to enable or disable the RAID function for each onchip SATA hard disk drive. The settings are: [Enabled], [Disabled].

You only have one SATA hard drive, which can't use RAID because a RAID configuration only works to make two or more drives function together in one of several different schemes, such as one drive mirroring the contents of another, etc. Click here! to go to information on RAID on this site.

Therefore, check to make sure that the SATA options are enabled and that the RAID options are disabled. If you had two or more IDE hard drives that you want to use in a RAID configuration, you would enable the IDE RAID options.

The PC would boot if the BIOS is set to boot from the CD/DVD drive first and the Windows XP installation CD is in the drive, because the hard drives are not in the picture as boot devices.

When I install Windows XP on an SATA hard drive and then reboot, the setup program asks me if I want to begin the setup all over again

Problem

I am trying to install Windows XP on an SATA hard disk drive. When I insert the Windows XP CD in the CD/DVD drive, the setup program works just fine. The install program recognises my SATA drive and starts installing the system. Then I have to reboot. Unfortunately, rebooting results in going back to XP's install menu that gives me the option to begin the process all over again. It appears that the BIOS doesn't try to boot from the SATA drive. Having no experience whatsoever of SATA drives (I have hitherto only had IDE hard drives), I don't have a clue about what I should do to fix the problem.

Answer

You have formatted the drive from the Windows XP installation CD, because you wouldn't have been able to install Windows XP if that wasn't the case. You might also have partitioned the drive.

You should have the boot sequence in the BIOS set to boot from an SATA drive. If you have a fairly recent motherboard, the setting for that must be there because it has SATA connectors. For older motherboards that don't have SATA connectors, if you have the SATA drive installed on an SATA PCI adapter card, there should be a setting in the BIOS called Boot from an SCSI controller. An SCSI controller for SCSI drives works in a similar way to an IDE adapter card. Enabling that setting should enable the system to boot from the SATA drive instead of from the motherboard's IDE controller.

You only have one SATA hard drive installed. The SATA (IDE) RAID feature (that controls two or more hard drives in a RAID array of drives), may be enabled in the BIOS as a default setting, so, start the computer up and enter the BIOS (usually by pressing the Del key after the memory count), and make sure that the RAID feature is disabled. For some reason, some motherboard manufacturers are under the impression that nobody installs only one SATA hard drive and therefore set the BIOS up for multiple drives by default, thereby making it impossible for a system with only one drive to function without changing that setting.

I can't find out if DMA is enabled for my hard disk drive in Windows XP/Vista

Problem

In order to speed up my slow computer, I was advised to make sure that Direct Memory Access (DMA) is enabled for my IDE hard drive. I know how to enable it in Windows 98. All you do is click on the hard drive's name under Disk drives in the Device Manager. [The hard drive should have a name such as Toshiba MK1032GSX (an IDE laptop hard drive).] You click on the hard drive's Settings tab. In the window that comes up there is a check box with DMA beside it that you enable. But, try as I might, I can't find out where DMA is enabled or disabled in Windows XP. When I enter msinfo32 in the Start => Run box to bring up the System Information window, there is information on DMA, but nothing on where to locate its enable/disable setting.

Answer

When you attempt to configure the direct memory access and programmed input/output (DMA/PIO) settings for a hard drive in Windows XP, the settings don't appear in the Properties dialog box for the hard drive. For some reason, Help and Support doesn't provide the location of the settings. The DMA/PIO settings are configured for each IDE controller instead of for each hard drive (as they are in Windows 98). To locate the settings, open the Control Panel, and then follow these steps to configure the DMA/PIO settings for an IDE controller:

1. - Use the right mouse button to click on My Computer, click Properties, followed the the Hardware tab.

2. - Click on the Device Manager button.

3. Expand IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers by clicking the + beside it.

4. Several primary and secondary controllers are listed. Click the controller for which you want to configure the DMA/PIO settings.

5. Click the Advanced Settings tab (if available; only active controllers will have this tab; inactive controllers may be listed).

6. In the Transfer Mode box, click either PIO Only or DMA if available.

The DMA setting in Windows Vista

In Windows Vista, to get to the Device Manager, right click on (Start =>) Computer and then click on Properties. Next, click on Device Manager under Tasks at the top left corner of the screen. The rest is much the same as in Windows XP.

If necessary, visit http://club.cdfreaks.com/1712831-post6.html to read an illustrated guide on how to do the above in Windows Vista.

DMA and SATA hard disk drives and CD/DVD/Blu-ray optical drives

Note that the information provided above on DMA (Direct Memory Access) only applies to IDE ATA hard drives and IDE ATAPI CD/DVD drives. For SATA drives SATA DMA is a setting that can be enabled or disabled in the BIOS setup program (if it is made available as a configurable setting), not in Windows. If you have purchased a PC that has SATA drives, it will have been enabled by default, but you will probably have to enabled it for a new motherboard that supports both IDE ATA and SATA drives. Consult the motherboard's user manual for motherboard-specific information.

Note that some motherboards have settings in the BIOS that can enable and disable DMA for IDE channel(s) (connector(s). Also note that internal Blu-ray optical drives use an SATA interface.

If necessary, read the following pages:

Device settings are hard to find in Windows XP - http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q310751

DMA Mode for ATA/ATAPI Devices in Windows XP - http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/IDE-DMA.mspx

Troubleshooting: Enabling/Checking DMA in Windows Vista, XP, 2000, Me, 9x -

http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=101616

My external hard disk drive is not recognised (US: recognized) by my PC

Problem

I have an elderly Dell Dimension XPS running Windows XP with 512MB of RAM and a 50GB SATA hard drive. I use a LaCie 80GB external hard drive for storage. I have antivirus and antispyware scanners and a firewall all of which are fully updated. The computer became very sluggish, so I decided to reformat the hard drive and reinstall everything. I was advised to disconnect the USB 2.0 cable of the external hard drive from the computer before reformatting the boot drive, which I did. The computer runs fine now, but, for some reason it doesn't recognise the LaCie external hard drive, even though the LED light indicating power is on and lights up, and I can feel the drive spinning. I tried installing the external hard drive on different computers, but it was not recognised. I am out of ideas. Is there any way I can get the drive working so I can recover the data stored on it?

Answer

It's not advisable to use an external hard drive for general data storage, which should really only be used only for temporary backups, because external hard drives are generally slower than internal hard drives. Most of them come preformatted to use the FAT32 file system, which has a 4GB file-size limit instead of the NTFS file system that is native to Windows XP/Vista. (With the NTFS file system , there is no maximum file size - a single file can be made to take up all of a drive or partition's free space.) Moreover, they are more likely to fail because of a greater likelihood of accidental bumping or dropping, and many external drive enclosures that house such drives are not properly cooled for continuous usage, which can lead to premature failure.

The possible causes of your problem are as follows:

1. - A bad cable, so try using another USB 2.0 cable just to make sure the cable is not damaged. 2. If you are using the same USB 2.0 port to connect the drive to the PC, it might have developed a fault, so try using a different port. 3. - The controller inside the Lacie drive or the drive itself has failed, which would necessitate replacing the drive. You could send it to a data recovery company that would charge an arm and a leg to recover the data if it is that valuable to you. You can find such companies by using the Google search box at the top of this page with its Web radio button enabled. To locate such companies in the UK, you could use a search term such as data + recovery + uk (as is). They also advertise in computer magazines such as Computer Shopper.

The hard drives used in home PCs typically have an average lifespan of five-years, but many last much longer and some can fail much sooner. In fact, because they can easily be damaged by being dropped, etc., some drives are fatally damaged during transportation to the vendor or the purchaser. Unfortunately, you rarely receive a warning of an impending failure, thus the need to make regular, restorable backups. Note that if the drive is under warranty, Lacie will repair or replace it, but the company will not recover any data and usually will reformat the drive during the process, so, if you want the data you'll have to recover it before returning the drive to its manufacturer.

When booting my PC/computer I can't have my external USB 2.0 hard drive turned on or else I get the message "Invalid system disk, please replace"

Problem

When booting my one of my PCs that runs Windows XP and has an MSI motherboard, I can't have my external USB 2.0 hard drive turned on or the error message "Invalid system disk, please replace" comes up. The PC boots fine if I leave the drive switched off and then turn it on after Windows has loaded. After the Windows XP logo appears I can turn the drive on. On my other computer that has an Asus motherboard, there is no problem starting up when the external hard drive is switched on.

Answer

Check that you have set the boot order of devices in the BIOS to the order that you want them to boot.

Some BIOSes allow you to set a USB flash drive or external hard disk drive as the first boot device. The image below shows how the settings appear in a particular AMI BIOS.

The settings for this vary one make of BIOS to another, but you should be able to locate the appropriate setting by going through the BIOS menu.

For example, in an AMI BIOS, in the Advanced BIOS Features section, you might see settings for First Boot Device, Second Boot Device, Third Boot Device, as shown in the image above. You will be able to set a floppy disk drive, CD/DVD, hard disk drive, USB drive, etc., as the first boot device.

If you had the floppy disk drive set as the first boot device and you left a standard non-bootable floppy disk in the floppy drive, you would get the same "Invalid system disk" message. When the computer starts, it is attempting to boot from the external hard drive, but it cannot find the operating system (Windows XP) on it, so it produces the error message. The first boot device should be the internal hard disk drive.

A floppy disk drive or CD/DVD drive has to be set as the first boot device in the BIOS in order to make the system boot from a floppy disk or CD/DVD, which must have bootable files on them.

If the problem isn't fixed by correcting those BIOS settings, try downloading and installing the latest drivers for the motherboard from the MSI website, and, if you still have the problem, try updating the BIOS itself, which may have a bug that is rectified by the update. The motherboard manufacturer's website provides BIOS updates and information on the ways in which they can be installed.

If you don't know the make and model of the motherboard installed in your computer, here is a good free utility - Belarc Advisor - that creates an analysis of the hardware and software on a personal computer. Look under FREE DOWNLOAD - http://www.belarc.com/. Another utility that also provides information on the motherboard is CPU-Z.

How do I install, partition and format an external USB/eSATA hard disk drive in Windows XP/Vista?

Problem

I have a new 500GB Western Digital hard disk drive installed in a USB 2.0 external disk enclosure. I need to know how to install, partition and format it to get it running. I'm using a dual-boot Windows XP/Windows Vista system, so I need to know how to do it in both versions of Windows.

Answer

As soon as you plug an external USB/eSATA hard disk drive into a system running Windows XP or Windows Vista, the drive should be detected automatically and the device drivers should be installed automatically.

However, Windows XP/Vista might encounter problems locating the device drivers necessary for the proper functioning of external drives. If Windows XP/Vista requests drivers for an external hard drive, the drivers will need to be loaded manually.

When that happens, Windows might alert you that the drivers were not installed correctly. These drivers are registered in the Windows Registry.

First, you should update Windows XP to Service Pack 3 (SP3) and Windows Vista to Service Pack 1 (SP1). There will be additional service packs for Windows Vista, but not for Windows XP.

If this does not resolve the problem and the drivers do not now load automatically, you can force Windows XP/Vista to istall the device drivers manually.

From Windows XP/Vista:

Right-click on My Computer (XP) - Computer (Vista).
Choose Manage.
Choose Device Manager.
Click the + box next to Other Devices.

Double-click the drive which is usually listed as USB Mass Storage, but may be listed under another name.

In Windows XP, double-click on the entry and open the Driver tab in the window that comes up. Click Update Driver. Run the Wizard. Don't choose the options to use Windows Update; use the last option that makes Windows search for the drivers internally.

In Windows Vista, a new window will open showing properties when you double-click the drive's entry. Click the Reinstall Driver button.

This opens the Update Driver software wizard. Click Locate and install driver software (recommended).

Then click Browse my computer for driver software.

Click Browse.

Open the Windows folder on the C: drive (Computer -> C: -> Windows) and click OK.

Make sure the Include subfolders box is checked.

Click Next. This should load the drivers.

If the device drivers don't install, download the latest versions from the drive's manufacturer and install them from the installation file.

Installing a hard disk drive in Windows XP: Unfortunately you can't just install a drive in the case and plug it in to make it work. You have to initialise and format the drive before it appears in My Computer and Windows Explorer.

Windows XP has an Initialize Disk Wizard. If you start Disk Management after adding a hard drive, the Initialize Disk Wizard appears so you can initialise the disk, partition, and then format it.

But if you have to access the Wizard manually for some reason, enter diskmgmt.msc in the Start => Run box or open the Control Panel => Administrative Tools => Computer Management => Disk Management. If an unformatted drive is present it is listed as one of the installed drives, each of which has a small descriptive section. For an unformatted drive the description says Unknown or Not Initialized. Right-click with the mouse pointer on it and select Initialize Disk, then right-click on the right-hand side of the next window and select New Partition to start the New Partition Wizard. Select Primary Partition and continue with the wizard.

If you require more information, click the link to the following page. It provides illustrated instructions on how to use the Wizard.

How to install an additional hard drive using Windows XP Disk Management -

http://seagate.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/seagate.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=3361

Disk Management in Windows Vista

Disk Management in Windows Vista is similar to the version in Windows XP, but has extra features.

To open Disk Management in Windows Vista, click the Start button and enter diskmgmt.msc in the Start Search box, or click the Start button => Computer and then select Manage. Expand the Storage section and select Disk Management.

Read Can I repartition my hard disk? on Microsoft's site.

The new version of Disk Management allows you to resize partitions on the fly without the loss of data. Just right-click on any partition and select Expand or Shrink.

Full click path: Click on the Start button, right-click the mouse with the mouse pointer on Computer and select Manage. Expand the Storage section and select Disk Management. Now just right-click on any partition and select either Expand or Shrink to change the size of the partition.

How to work with partitions in Windows Vista/XP when Disk Management doesn't work -

http://www.vistarewired.com/2007/04/07/...

How can I format an external USB hard drive in Windows XP/Wndows Vista without having to make it the C: drive?

Question

Is there a way to format an external hard disk drive that I've placed in a hard drive enclosure and connected via a USB port? My computer runs Windows XP. I recently installed a 500GB hard drive, then a week later, had to return my PC's original 250GB hard drive to the vendor. When it, or a replacement, was returned, I tried to set it up as an external drive in an enclosure with a USB connection, but it wouldn't format. I had to remove the side of the PC case, disconnect my 500GB C: drive , and format the 250GB external drive as if it were my C: drive. Once I got the first half partitioned (partitioned as two drives) and formatted, I reinstalled the 500GB drive as the C: drive, and then was able to format the second partition on the external USB drive. That seems like a lot of trouble to me. Can a brand new, out-of-the-box hard disk drive, cabled as an external USB drive, be partitioned and formatted without having to make it the C: drive?

Answer

With earlier versions of Windows (98, Me, 2000) you would have to use a third party program, such as Partition Magic or Paragon Partition Manager, to partition a drive using a USB connection, because the partitioning programs they use can only partition and format drives over standard IDE or SATA hard-drive cables. (They don't understand a USB connection). However, Disk Management in Windows XP/Vista can do it.

If an external hard disk drive already has data on it, it does not need to be initialised (US:initialized), but if it is a new or unformatted drive it has to be initialised. Initialisation is only necessary before the drive has been partitioned and formatted. After you have initialised the drive, you can choose to use the whole volume as a single partition or break the drive up into several partitions. To do that you create an extended partition and then you creat logical drives (partitions) within that extended partition that Windows assigns a drive letter.

In Windows XP and Windows Vista , with the new unpartitioned USB hard disk drive connected, enter diskmgmt.msc in the Start => Run box in Windows XP and in the Start => Start Search box in Windows Vista, to bring up Disk Management. The drive should be given a space there with the other drives, and you should be able to partition and format if from there by right-clicking on its space. If it hasn't been initialised, you have to initialise (US: initialize) it in Disk Management before you can format it, but it will be listed there.

Initializing a hard disk drive is done in the same way in Windows XP and Windows Vista via Disk Management.

Here is what Windows XP's Help and Support says about initialising a disk:

"To initialize new disks: Open Computer Management (Local). In the console tree, click Disk Management. Right-click the disk you want to initialize, and then click Initialize Disk. [The quickest way to open Disk Management in XP/Vista is provided above.] In the Initialize Disk dialog box, select the disk(s) to initialize. The disk is initialized as a basic disk. To open Computer Management, click Start, and then click Control Panel. Double-click Administrative Tools, and then double-click Computer Management. You must be logged on as an administrator or a member of the Administrators group in order to complete this procedure. If your computer is connected to a network, network policy settings might also prevent you from completing this procedure. New disks appear as Not Initialized. Before you can use a disk, you must first initialize it. If you start Disk Management after adding a disk, the Initialize Disk Wizard appears so you can initialize the disk."

If you want to initialise, partition and format a new empty hard disk drive in a PC that doesn't have Windows installed, you should boot the system with the Windows XP/Vista CD/DVD and use its partitioning utility. To boot from a bootable CD/DVD disc, which the Windows installation disc is, the CD/DVD drive must be set as the first boot device in the BIOS setup program. This hard disk drive problem on this page shows and example of the BIOS settings that determine the boot order of devices (floppy disk drive, hard disk drive, CD/DVD drive, USB drive, etc).

To create a partition or logical drive using by using Windows, open Disk Management and then do the following:

1. - Right-click an unallocated region of a basic hard disk drive, and then click New Partition, or right-click in an extended partition, and then click New Logical Drive to add a new drive partition within that extended partition.

2. - In the New Partition Wizard, click Next, click Primary partition, Extended partition, or Logical drive, and then follow the instructions on your screen.

Remember that an extended partition is created within a primary partition and logical drives are created within the extended partition, so you can't ceate logical drives (partitions with their own drive letters) that Windows assigns a drive letter to, such as F:, G:, H:, etc., unless you create an extended partition first.

Primary partitions are limited to four per hard disk drive. If you want to install an operating system (Windows, Linux, OS X) into a partition, you have to create a primary partition, because only a primary partition can be made bootable and the operating system has to boot the computer.

If you want to create more than four partitions, you have to create an extended partition. An extended partition counts towards the limit of four partitions per hard disk drive, but you are allowed to create logical drives within these extended partitions. Extended partitions are not bootable. Therefore only programs can be installed in them by the operating system that has been installed in a primary partition. Of course, files, such as backup files and data files, can also be copied into them.

The reason that you had to format the drive as the C: drive is probably because you didn't partition the drive. That is, the vendor sent you a replacement drive that was unpartitioned (does not have a partition table). Windows already uses the C: drive for the boot drive, so you have to create a partition by using Disk Management in Windows XP/Vista (enter diskmgmt.msc in the Start => Run box in XP and in the Start => Start Search box in Vista).

Note that you can also assign, change or remove drive letters on all but the boot drive from within Disk Management or from the Command Prompt. To bring it up enter cmd in the Start => Run box in XP and in the Start => Start Search box in Vista.

Assign, change, or remove a drive letter - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc757491.aspx

My external USB hard disk drive has shrunk from 60GB to only 4GB after using Paragon Partition Manager. - How can I recover the lost space?

Problem

My computer is running Windows XP Home Edition. I have an external Maxtor USB hard disk drive that I store data on. It was working perfectly until I tried to use Paragon Partition Manager to move the data from an old PC to a new one using the USB drive. Somehow the drive has been reduced from a capacity of 60GB to only 4GB. I have no idea how to recover the lost space or if I can recover the data that was on the drive. I tried using System Restore to restore a restore point that predated the problem, but without success.

Answer

System Restore can't be used to restore lost space on a hard drive because it only restores Windows system files.

Paragon Partition Manager would have copied all of the partitions on your old hard drive to the USB drive that would have overwritten any partition(s) already on the drive.

You could still recover any lost data. Using a professional service is very expensive, but you can use relatively inexpensive data recovery software, such as O&O DiskRecovery.

"O&O DiskRecovery V4 functionality begins where other programs leave off. This software combs every sector of a hard disk, memory card, or digital camera to find lost files. Even when files systems are formatted or destroyed, it is possible to reconstruct once deleted data." -

http://www.oo-software.com/home/en/products/oodiskrecovery/

You might be able to buy an earlier version, such O&O DiskRecovery 3.0 Personal Edition, on an auction site such as eBay.

If you don't want to recover any data, you can use Disk Management in Windows XP/windows Vista to reformat the drive in order to recover the full capacity of the drive.

Plug the drive into a USB port. To open Disk Management, enter diskmgmt.msc in the Start => Run box.

In Windows Vista, use the Start => Start Search box.

Click here! to see an image of the window that presents itself.

The hard disk drives installed and all of the partitions are displayed. The drive letters that you can see in My Computer (just Computer in Windows Vista) are shown at the top of the window. A graphical representation of the physical drives and their partitions is shown in the bottom part of the window.

Disk 0 is the computer's boot hard disk drive, which usually contains Windows. Disk 0 can contain several other drives with drive letters of their own called logical drives that are created within an extended partition, which must itself be created using Disk Management or a third party partitioning utility, such as Paragon Partition Manager. You can see the green border indicating the extended partitions surrounding the light blue logical drives. The C: and H: drives in Disk 0 and Disk 1 are the primary partitions.

Your USB externl hard drive will be shown as Disk 1 if you don't have a second internal hard disk drive installed.

Right-click with the mouse on Disk 1 and select Properties to find out which drive it is. If it is the correct drive, right-click on each partition and choose Delete Partition, then right-click on the empty space that doing that leaves and choose Create new partition. Choose to use all of the available disk space to create a primary partition and then right-click again to choose the Format option to format its with the NTFS file system.

File systems: How to convert from the FAT32 file system to NTFS

Question

I bought a new desktop computer that came with Windows XP Professional installed on drive D: - so that drive C: could contain the Recovery System. Another oddity is that FAT32 is the file system in use instead of XP's native NTFS file system. The company that I bought the computer from went bust, so the warranty is worthless, and I can now convert to NTFS and have Windows XP on the C: drive without rendering it void. I need to know if this can be done without reinstalling everything.

Answer

Some OEM computer manufacturers and vendors (that have to provide the technical support for their merchandise) prefer to have their system's set up to use FAT32 instead of NTFS because the latter file system is far more secure and complex and hence more prone to require technical support. Indeed, it is for this reason that Time Computers [no longer in business] made it a condition of the warranty that renders it void if the file system is changed from FAT32 to NTFS.

If a computer has a hard disk drive larger than 64GB, or a user wants to have partitions on a drive larger than 64GB, the NTFS file system is a must. If you want to keep using FAT32 without problems, drives and partitions of drives that are smaller than 64GB are required.

See FDISK on this site for information on the use of that MS DOS partitioning utility on a FAT32 drive.

Windows XP has a Convert utility that converts a FAT32 partition to NTFS without having to copy all of the data elsewhere. This is a time-consuming process and the files are not as well arranged on the drive as they would be if they were installed on a partition that was already configured to use NTFS. Moreover, the cluster size, which is the size of the addressable units that the partition is broken down into when the file system is created, can be set far too low at only 512 bytes (0.5KB) per cluster, and this can slow down file access significantly.

Moreover, note well that unless the user enables the Cvtarea option before the drive or partition is converted, a new Master File Table (MFT) is created that is placed all over the drive/partition. And even though it is the most used file on a drive, Windows XP's Disk Defragmenter can't defragment a fragmented MFT. Even if you defragment the drive before running the conversion, there is no guarantee that the MFT won't be fragmented. Read the following article on how to use the Cvtarea command.

Build a Better NTFS Converter - http://redmondmag.com/columns/article.asp?EditorialsID=643

Note that Sysinternals is now owned by Microsoft.

The Contig utility can be downloaded from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb545046.aspx.

Read CONVERTING FAT32 to NTFS in Windows XP for information on how to prepare a drive before converting it to NTFS in order to avoid using 512 byte clusters.

How to find out what a drive's cluster size is in Windows XP/Windows Vista

To find out what the cluster size is for a particular drive, enter cmd in Windows XP's Start => Run box (Windows Vista's Start => Start Search box) to bring up the Command Prompt. Enter the command chkdsk c: to check the C: drive (or any other drive's letter to check that drive). After the quick check has taken place, a message appears that provides information about the drive. Note the number next to the bytes in each allocation unit line.

The bytes in each allocation unit is the drive's cluster size in bytes. To obtain the cluster size in kilobytes (KB), divide the number by 1024. For example, if Chkdsk shows 4,096 bytes in each allocation unit, then the cluster size is 4 KB. (4,096 bytes / 1,024 bytes per KB = 4KB). If it shows 512 bytes, you'll have to format the drive to get it to 4KB. If it's the C: drive and Windows XP/Vista is installed on it, you'll have to format the drive and reinstall Windows and all of your software applications. To do that you would boot the system from the Windows CD/DVD (the BIOS might have have to be set to use the CD/DVD drive as the first boot drive). Note that you are given the option reformat the drive during the Windows setup process.

Note that if you make a backup of a FAT32 drive with a backup utility such as the one that comes with Windows XP/Vista, or make a master image with a utility such as Norton Ghost and burn it to a CD/DVD discs, the file system is also backed up. Consequently, it is restored when the backup or master image is restored. Therefore, you can't make a backup or master image of a FAT32 a drive, format it with NTFS, and then restore the back-up or master image, because the FAT32 file system will be restored as well.

****

Windows File Systems: Converting to NTFS from FAT32 - FAT32 versus NTFS on this site has some additional information on the advantages and disadvantages of using NTFS instead of FAT32.

My PC runs the hard disk drive in UDMA/ATA 33 mode instead of UDMA/ATA 100/133

Problem

[Note that with regard to the terms used to describe an IDE hard disk drive, UDMA (Ultra Direct Memory Access) is equivalent to the term ATA (Advanced Technology Attachment).]

I have an ECS K7S5A motherboard fitted with and Athlon XP 2000+ processor. My start-up screen shows that the computer's four IDE drives are operating using Mode 2 UDMA-33, but I know that the motherboard supports UDMA-100. The two hard drives are a 30GB Maxtor 7200 133 drive, set as master, and a 10GB Seagate 5400 100 drive set as slave on the primary IDE channel (IDE0). I have Windows Me installed on the C: drive, and Windows XP Home edition on the E: drive of the Maxtor drive. The Seagate drive has been assigned as the D: drive. I have a CD-ROM drive and a CD-RW (CD rewriter) drive on the secondary IDE channel (IDE1). DMA mode is enabled for all of the drives in the Device Manager of both operating systems. I want to know why the drives aren't working in UDMA 100 mode.

Answer

To operate in Ultra Direct Memory Access 66 (UDMA 66) mode, or faster, the hard disk drive that supports that mode must be connected to the motherboard with an 80-conductor IDE cable, not a 40-conductor UDMA 33 cable.

With one of the hard drives capable of using UDMA 133 mode, and the other capable of using UDMA 100 mode, the system should be selecting to use the highest mode that the motherboard supports - UDMA 100 mode - which for all practical purposes is equivalent to the 133 mode.

You should check that the cable is an 80-conductor IDE cable (see here for more information on this subject - http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confCable80-c.html) and that it is connected correctly. With the most common colour scheme used for these ribbon cables, the blue connector connects to the motherboard, the black connector connects to the primary boot drive, and the grey connector in the middle of the cable connects to another IDE hard disk drive - if the Cable Select option is used. There is a jumper on the drive that sets the drive as a master drive, slave drive, or to use Cable Select that makes the position of the drives on the cable determine the master and slave drive). It is usually the best option to set the drives as master and slave drives instead of using the Cable Select option. If the master/slave settings are used on each of the drives to determine their relationship to each other, you can attach the drives to any of the two connection points on the IDE cable that don't connect to the motherboard.

If those checks are not applicable, try using a different cable, because some cables are of poor quality, or exceed the length-specification for such cables. The specifications require a maximum length of 18 inches, but some IDE Controllers allow cables 24 and even 36 inches long.

You should note that the new round IDE cables can often suffer from cross-talk problems (signals crossing from one cable to the other) that slow the UDMA mode of operation down.

It is preferable to install the two hard drives on separate cables, because this speeds up the transfer of data between the two drives. However, this can be difficult to arrange, because some CD-RW drives (CD writers) will not work unless they are installed as the master drive on a cable, and older CD-ROM drives do not support the UDMA (ATA) modes.

It also looks as if there might be a BIOS or Windows device driver issue involved, because the BIOS reports Mode 2 UDMA-33 instead of the ATA 33 description that a more recent BIOS would use.

As a last resort, reflash the BIOS with the latest file from the motherboard's website. But first check the websites of the manufacturers of the two hard drives for device driver updates, and do likewise from the motherboard's site. The motherboard uses a chipset made by SiS, and there are know problems with older SiS IDE drivers when two drives are being used. You should run the SiSIDE utility that should have come with the SiS IDE driver file. You run it by opening the Device Manager and then You should also make sure that Windows XP is using ACPI power management (look under Help (Windows Me) and Help and Support (Windows XP) if you need more information about it), because ECS BIOSes are know to have problems with UDMA if ACPI is disabled.

Note that Windows XP will disable DMA operations or limit the maximum speed for any hard drives that have six or more successive DMA time-out errors and use only the slower PIO mode on that device. Once disabled or locked down to a lower speed, the drive won't be able to run at its previous higher speed unless you run the SiSIDE utility to rectify the situation. If you have a computer that is using PIO mode and you want to revert to DMA mode, it can be done manually by following the instructions on this page:

http://sniptools.com/vault/getting-back-to-dma-mode-in-windows-xp

There is currently (October 2008) no information on the web that says that Windows Vista reverts to using PIO mode under those circumstances.

In Windows XP, how can I change the UDMA mode from the reported UDMA mode 5 to the actual UDMA mode 6 that my motherboard supports?

Problem

In Windows XP, when I check in the Device Manager's Primary Hard Disk Controller, Advanced section, it shows that my hard disk drive - an ATA 133 Samsung SP1614N - is using the lower UDMA mode 5 (ATA 100), which transfers data at 100Mbit/s. But my hard drive and motherboard both support UDMA mode 6 (ATA 133), which has a data-transfer rate of 133Mbit/s. I've installed all of the Windows XP updates, and checked the BIOS settings, but, try as I might, I can't find a way of getting the correct mode reported.

Answer

Your Samsung hard disk drive spins at 7,200RPM (revs per minute), and both of those modes can transfer data much faster than a drive spinning at that rate can deliver, so the difference between ATA 133 (UDMA mode 6) and ATA 100 (UDMA mode 5) would hardly be noticeable. The full transfer rate can only be applied when data is read from the hard drive's relatively small internal cache (buffer), and since there is so little difference in the speed of these two modes, it makes very little difference if the higher mode is being used.

It looks as if the system is using the standard Microsoft IDE driver instead of the motherboard chipset's bus mastering IDE driver.

If only the Microsoft driver is installed, you need to download the motherboard's IDE driver from its manufacturer's site and install it, usually just by double-clicking on the downloaded self-installing file.

You can discover which driver is installed by right-clicking (Start =>) My Computer, followed by Properties => Hardware => Device Manager. (You can also enter devmgmt.msc in the Start => Run box.) To open it, click on the + sign beside the IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers section. If the correct motherboard's driver is installed, the controller will have the motherboard's chipset maker's name. For example, if it's a chipset made by VIA, it's called the VIA Bus Mastering Controller. Anyhow, to check the driver details, just double-click on the entry there or right-click and then choose Properties => Driver Details.

If the standard Microsoft IDE driver is installed, it's called Atapi.sys. If there are other drivers installed, then those will be the motherboard's chipset manufacturer's drivers that Windows will be using if the make/model of the chipset manufacturer is provided above the Primary IDE Channel and Secondary IDE Channel entries. If no manufacturer (VIA, Intel, etc.) is mentioned then the standard Windows driver is being used.

You should be able to download the latest motherboard chipset drivers from the motherboard manufacturer's website. If you don't know the make and model of the motherboard installed in your computer, here is a good free utility - Belarc Advisor - that creates an analysis of the hardware and software on a personal computer. Look under FREE DOWNLOAD - http://www.belarc.com/. Another utility that also provides information on the motherboard is CPU-Z.

You say that you've check in the BIOS to make sure that any setting that enables ATA-133 operation is enabled. But if the installed driver doesn't support that mode, it won't be used, so make sure that it's enabled after you've installed the motherboard driver that does support that mode. Installing a BIOS update might be required for a motherboard that originally only supported ATA-100 mode, because an updated BIOS can allow the motherboard to run the drive in the higher ATA-133 mode.

Note that even when the correct IDE driver file is installed, the system will be working at the full ATA-133 speed of 133MHz, but Windows may still report the interface as being UDMA mode 5 (ATA-100). If so, this is the case because the Windows IDE driver doesn't support ATA-133 operation, so the Windows reporting feature can't report when it's in use. But, rest assured, if the BIOS is set to use it and the the driver supports UDMA mode 6 (ATA-133), that is the mode that's being used regardless of what Windows reports.

If your computer is still running the original version of Windows XP, or just has Service Pack 1 (SP1) installed, installing Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) will probably put that issue right. I have encountered many elderly computers that are still just running the original version of Windows XP that became available in 2001.

Note that SP3 is available from Microsoft's site. You have to have SP2 installed in order to install it. If it causes problems with your system, you can uninstall it from the Control Panel's Add or Remove Programs.

Every time I start my PC up the IDE hard disk drive is checked for consistency

Problem

Every time I start my computer, a message comes up before Windows XP starts saying that the 160GB IDE Hitachi hard disk drive needs to be checked for consistency. Windows then checks the files and everything continues normally. This happens every time I start the computer.

Possible solutions

The most likely explanation is that the system is not writing back all of the cached hard-disk-drive information before it turns off the computer. There is a patch for this bug in Service Pack 1 for Windows XP (SP1), so, if you don't already have SP1, SP2 or SP3 installed, you should download and install SP2, which contains SP1, and then install SP3, because SP3 reuires SP2 to be installed. They are all large service packs that would take a very long time to download on a dial-up 56K-modem connection. If you have a dial-up connection, you can obtain the CD/DVD containing the service pack that you want from Microsoft's site.

The problem could also occur on a multi-boot system running Windows XP, Windows 98, or Windows Me. If the Windows 98/Me system is missing a large IDE cache patch for the problem, it would also fail to write back the cached information before shutting the system down.

On some older computers, you may have to reflash the BIOS. If necessary, see the BIOS page on this site.

There could also be a hardware problem with the drive itself, so use the free diagnostic utility provided by the drive's manufacturer, Hitachi, to check it. You can obtain it here: http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm.

There could also be a problem with the drive's partition record - especially if the drive was partitioned by using a third-party partitioning utility such as Partition Magic or Partition Manager. For instance, although problems only usually start occurring with drives or partitions over 64GB in size (see IDE1.htm#fdisk on this site), Microsoft does not recommend using the FAT32 file system for partitions over 32GB in size. (NTFS is Windows XP's native file system, but it can use FAT32 if upgraded from Windows 98, or FAT32 is opted for during the installation.) Indeed, Windows XP's own partition-creation utility that is run from the Windows CD, will refuse to create a partition larger than 32GB using FAT32. Other third-party partition utilities can create larger FAT32 partitions than that, and one or more partitions in excess of Microsoft's limit, or the real problematic limit of 64GB, could therefore be the cause of the problem.

My PC/computer is experiencing a system slow-down or a 'thrashing' hard disk drive, the LED light for which flashes showing constant activity?

It is assumed that your desktop or laptop PC worked relatively speedily once upon a time and that it has suddenly slowed down and/or the LED light on the front of the case (which is somewhere on lower half of a laptop) the flashes constantly, indicating incessant activity, which shouldn't be the case.

The most likely reasons for a system slow-down or a 'thrashing' hard disk drive are an outdated, slow hard disk drive that has outdated drivers installed, has become crammed with applications, is overloaded with programs loaded at start-up, as a consequence has a Windows Registry that has grown bloated with redundant entries, and/or a system that has insufficient RAM memory, either on the motherboard as system RAM, or on the video card as graphics RAM, a dying BIOS battery, or a failed processor heatsink and fan unit (processor cooler), the latter two of which can easily be replaced. If the computer is older than five years old, its BIOS battery should be replaced.

Note well that Windows XP/Vista requires a certain amount of free hard-disk space in order to function efficiently. Even the Disk Defragmenter will refuse to work if it doesn't have enough free disk space. You can find out how much free space there is on each drive under My Computer (XP) or Computer (Vista). A modern computer running those versions of Windows should have a minimum of about 5GB to 10GB of free disk space if System Restore is enabled for each drive, because it uses plenty of disk space for its restore points (backup files). It is enabled by default for each drive, but you can turn it off for each drive. Internet Explorer, the Recycle Bin, and the virtual-memory Paging (swap) File also reserve disk space for themselves.

To find out how you can change the size of the Paging File in Windows XP/Vista, enter paging file in the Search box of Help and Support.

There is plenty of advice on the web on how best to set the virtual memory. Just enter a search term such as virtual + memory + xp or virtual + memory + vista (as is) in the Google search box at the top of this page (with its Web radio button enabled) to locate links to it.

Most of these problems are easy to remedy. First try updating your video card's and hard disk drive's drivers by downloading them from the manufacturer's website (http://www.nvidia.com/ for nVidia graphics cards, http://www.seagate.com for Seagate drives; http://www.wdc.com/, for Western Digital, etc.), and then use the Add or Remove Programs in the Control Panel in Windows XP to remove unnecessary programs, applications, utilities, etc., clear the Recycle Bin, and then use the Windows Disk Defragmenter (or your own third party program) to defragment the disk.

In Windows XP, the Disk Defragmenter is located under Start => All programs => Accessories => System Tools.

Windows Vista has an automatic Disk Defragmenter that is enabled by default (to run at 1:00 a.m. every Wednesday). You can disable or modify this by performing the following steps:

Click the Start button => Control Panel => System and Maintenance and choose Defragment your hard drive under Administrative Tools , which is at the bottom of the menu/list.

The Add or Remove Programs utility, in the Control Panel in Windows XP, can often leave whole folders intact, so open Windows Explorer (right-click the mouse on the Start button and then click Explore), and remove any left-over folders manually. You can download many Windows Registry cleaners.

The same is still true of Windows Vista.

To add or remove programs in Windows Vista, click Start => Control Panel => double-click on the Programs and Features icon.

In the windows that presents itself, all of the programs and items that are installed in Windows Vista are listed.

To remove any of them, click once on the program you want to uninstall and then click on Uninstall/Change and follow the prompts.

RegSeeker and CCleaner are good free Windows Registry cleaners, or visit majorgeeks.com, zdnet.com, or tucows.com for other cleaners and program installers/uninstallers.

Some of them will also be able to find unnecessary files that can be removed, such as the .tmp files that Windows or applications create and leave in the Windows Temp folder - and elsewhere.

You can also make use of the Disk Cleanup utility in Windows XP/Vista to remove unnecessary files. You can make use of the Google search box at the top of this page (with its Web radio button enabled) to find out how to use it. The search terms disk + cleanup + xp and disk + cleanup + vista (as is) should work well.

The StartUp Control Panel from http://www.mlin.net/ allows you to control what applications are loaded at start-up from the Windows XP Control Panel. It is compatible with all versions of Windows up to Windows XP. Unlike the previous version of Windows, Windows Visa has a very good built-in startup manager. Go to Start => Control Panel => Performance Information and Tools, and then click on Manage Startup Programs on the left.

Or you can enter msconfig in the Start => Run box to bring up the System Configuration Utility in Windows XP. (In Windows Vista enter the same command in the Start => Start Search box).

Click on its Startup tab and you'll see the list of start-up programs. You can disable any of them by removing the check mark beside each program with the mouse, but you can't remove the program's entry as you can by using the StartUp Control Panel. Also, disabling programs such as cfmon (cfmon.exe) makes Windows XP start up in Selective Startup mode, which is a setting in the System Configuration Utility's General tab. You'll have to re-enable cfmon in order to be able to start up in Normal Startup mode. So, unless you know what the program is, don't disable it unless you've looked up what the program does by entering its file name in Google, or another search engine.

Too many start-up programs will slow the boot down considerably, and will consume system resources that will slow it down during use. One start-up program in particular, is a anti-virus application set to load at start-up, and set to check every file that is opened for viruses. This slows the system down, so you should turn this feature off. Use an anti-virus program to scan downloaded files after that have been downloaded, scan the hard disk drive periodically, scan CDs that will autoload, and scan e-mail attachments. There is no need to have it set to scan the system the whole time it is operating.

If the system is still slow, install a new, faster hard disk drive, add some system RAM (it is currently very cheap), and, if necessary, replace the video card with one with more graphics RAM (minimum 32MB, but check your motherboard's FAQ page for compatibility issues). Such upgrades can speed up a system so considerably that a processor upgrade might not be necessary, depending, of course, what you use the computer for.

If a Windows system has insufficient RAM to make it run smoothly, it makes use of its virtual memory swap (paging) file that is on the hard disk drive to swap data in and out of RAM memory. Using virtual memory is much slower than using RAM memory, so increasing the amount of RAM where an insufficient amount is installed, improves perfromance by lessening the use of the hard drive.

Visit the RAM pages on this site for information about memory, including how to determine how much memory to install for a particular version of Windows, and the best memory to install.

If the system is still slow, you could consult the system's motherboard manual to find out the fastest processor is that it can run and then try to obtain one. You should be able to obtain a copy of the manual from the motherboard manufacturer's website in the PDF format if you don't have a copy. If you don't know the make and model of the motherboard installed in your computer, here is a good free utility - Belarc Advisor - that creates an analysis of the hardware and software on a personal computer. Look under FREE DOWNLOAD - http://www.belarc.com/. Another utility that also provides information on the motherboard itself is CPU-Z.

The Ebay online auction sites around the world are good sites to visit for processors that can no longer be purchased from the major vendors. Register with your country's Ebay site or the site that operates in the country nearest to yours, note the deadline for bids on a particular item, and then wait for the last few minutes of an auction to put in the highest bid. You'll be informed of your success or failure by e-mail.

Remember to check a seller's feedback from customers on eBay before you make a purchase, and also check what kind of goods are being sold. You can click on each item of feedback to go to the actual auction page. sellers can obtain good feedback for selling cheap goods and delivering it, and the sell expensive goods which are never delivered after they have been paid for.