i have a laptop "dell inspiron 1525. i feel very slow and i am hearing sound form HDD. i did a performance check with performance monitor. i came to know that it is taking long time to read and write process in the HDD. how to show this problem to dell. if i format my HDD, will it make sense?
i am having trouble in my HDD
It sounds like your HDD is damaged. Take backup of your important files because it might be worse. It might work a day, maybe a year but in the end you will have to buy a new HDD.
Did you try checking the performance under Task Manager ( hit CTRL + ALT + DEL) and see if your CPU usage is always at 100%. At default, it should be no more than 20% when idle and if you see it constant at close to 100% then there may be some backgroud software causing the slowdown. Possibly a virus attack. Have you done a defragmentation to your HDD? Maybe you should also do a scandisk to see if bad sectors are detected. How much free space do you currently have on your HDD?
If all else fails... then you may have to do a reformat and reinstall. But just remember to do a backup of all the important files you need first (email records, contact list, my documents files etc).
If all else fails... then you may have to do a reformat and reinstall. But just remember to do a backup of all the important files you need first (email records, contact list, my documents files etc).
Two possibilities:
1: Damaged HDD: Usually they don't slow down the system, they'll ordinarily either work fine, work with noise and sectors that won't read, or not work at all. If this is the case, back up your data and have a spare HDD ready to put in when the old one finally breaks, which it will. This problem happens a lot with laptops, and is usually caused by the laptop being dropped or knocked around.
2: You could be experiencing hard disk thrashing. This is when you run out of RAM, and your computer uses the hard drive for extra memory. The slow down would be because the hard drive is slower than RAM, and the extra noise would be the constant reading and writing access to the drive. Check and see if you are using 100% of your memory. (Also, if this problem is happening even during the beginning of the boot-up process, it probably isn't thrashing. This would normally only happen when you are running programs.) If this is the case, add more RAM, or reduce memory usage.
1: Damaged HDD: Usually they don't slow down the system, they'll ordinarily either work fine, work with noise and sectors that won't read, or not work at all. If this is the case, back up your data and have a spare HDD ready to put in when the old one finally breaks, which it will. This problem happens a lot with laptops, and is usually caused by the laptop being dropped or knocked around.
2: You could be experiencing hard disk thrashing. This is when you run out of RAM, and your computer uses the hard drive for extra memory. The slow down would be because the hard drive is slower than RAM, and the extra noise would be the constant reading and writing access to the drive. Check and see if you are using 100% of your memory. (Also, if this problem is happening even during the beginning of the boot-up process, it probably isn't thrashing. This would normally only happen when you are running programs.) If this is the case, add more RAM, or reduce memory usage.
You could just wipe out your disk. But wiped it out.
Have you run hdparm?
# hdparm -tT /dev/some_device
Have you run hdparm?
# hdparm -tT /dev/some_device
| albuferque wrote: |
| You could just wipe out your disk. But wiped it out.
|
Bad idea... If the drive does have errors on it, it may not be possible to put data back on after you wipe it. Several times I've seen a hard drive that worked, but had a few errors on it die completely because when it was formatted, the bad sectors caused the format to fail.
If the hard drive is the problem, just back up your data and plan to get a new one soon.
If you are using Linux as OS then dmesg should tell you clearly if there are IO errors. In Windows it is bit difficult to find this. There is Ultimate Boot CD that you can use to run tests on your disk to find out IO speed and any errors. Be careful though and know what you tools you run, some destroy data on your disk (Ultimate Boot CD). It is not a good idea to run IO tests from the OS (XP or Vista) if you only got one disk and it is your primary disk for OS.
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