The internal hard disk connection has to be refreshed with the motherboard – uninstalled / reinstalled.
What I actually did to try for an answer with the same problem was move the Sata cable
from one "Master" motherboard socket to the spare "Master" socket.
When XP restarted it “Found New Hardware” and refreshed the connection.
Amazingly everything was back to normal and working fast.
Current transfer rate is 47 x DVD write speed compared to problem performance of 2 x dvd write speed.
So somewhere within the system something became corrupted somehow.
Alternatively I am guessing, because I did not do it this way, but you could * "Uninstall" in "Device Manager"
turn off computer, remove hard disk cable, restart the computer, shutdown again, replug-in cable, restart.
The computer should auto detect new hardware or maybe you have to go back into device manager and re-install it.
This would be easy for a problem hard disk with no operating system on it.
I don't know what would happen if you did this to a hard disk with the operating system on it ?
Would the bios auto re-install the hard drive at next startup following steps above* ?
The Symptoms were;
My computer has 2 Sata NTFS formatted hard disks. 1 master, 1 slave.
C: XP operating system Western Digital 80Gig hard disk is noticeably very slow lately.
D: Seagate 120Gig hard disk for extra storage no change in fast performance.
I noticed when copying a video file from D: hard disk to C: instead of 40 secs it would take 6 minutes and sometimes the times would go back and forth / fluctuate!
Also disk defragmentation for C: when analyzing it would take 20 seconds longer than in the past. It would gradually reveal blue bars a bit at a time until the full analyzing had been done. In its healthy state the analysing would flash finish in only about 2 or 3 secs when HD was ¾’s full.
Also HD disk “Error-checking” = My Computer > Manage > Disk Management > right click on blue line of disk > Properties > Tools > Error-checking ; the 4 or 5th part of the checking would take all day and night or longer if I let it.
Cutting a fews days troubleshooting short with scarce Google solutions and most answers were “your hard disk is going to die” or “your computer has a virus” I downloaded the free version of Harddisk Sentinal at
http://www.hdsentinel.com/index.php
I started it and had the “Disk Performance” tab opened.
I copied an over 100mb file from D: to C: to get program to measure transfer / write speed.
For hard drive C: The Estimated Max. Transfer Rate reported only 2 x DVD write speed !!!
D: report was 37 x DVD write speed !
All hard disk analysers tried including Western Digital's and "Harddisk Sentinal" said hard disk was perfect and reported no problems.
So what they didn’t do was
! alarm ! a very low write speed but I did see that Harddisk Sentinal" was the best analyser I tried.
.