I'm having a problem with my Hard Drive. Actually, I've noticed that my hard is getting slow and HDD Life shows that it has 52% of health and performance, but it's not only that. The Process Explorer shows that hardware interrupts are wasting all the CPU and only after I start to use my HD (copying, burning DVDs, etc.) Can anyone explain to me what is wrong with these interrupts. I know how it works, but why it's wasting my CPU?
A few things I'd do: 1.)Defrag your hard drive 2.)Obtain--if you don't have it already--diagnostic software from your hard drive manufacturer to run a check on your drive. This is free software, so there shouldn't be any fee for it unless they've made policy changes that I'm not aware of. 3.)Patch the software 4.)Make sure DMA is enabled on your drives, which you can find through device manager by checking the ATA controllers.
Actually, that were the first things I did. Still the same. It happened before and I just reinstalled my OS and may be there is another way to get rid of it. I've noticed that it happens only with SATA HDs. Forgot to say that it started right after my comp froze and I had to restart it. It froze because I inserted USB Flash Drive and it repeats to freeze every time again when I insert any of USB devices.
That's the particular HAL--Hardware Abstraction Layer driver that's been installed as the driver for the computer type. ACPI allows for more than 15 IRQ's by putting a device on a virtual IRQ to make it happy. If your system wasn't showing that, we'd be looking at a way to install that. It was a guess, which I figured was at least worth a shot to figure this problem out.
That was my big mistake to say "everything is ok" when HD health status is less than 50%. After I reinstalled the CPu driver the system was stable for 1 day. Now the problem is back and OS automatically changed my HD transfer mode from DMA to PIO. Maybe somebody knows how to change transfer mode not using BIOS, because I have only "AUTO" and "DISABLE" data transfer options for HD in BIOS. And I tried to change it with the Registry - it did work. My HD SEEK ERROR RATE STATUS is 48% now, it means that Windows XP automatically changes HD transfer mode to lower when SEEK ERROR rate is decreasing. I don't know what to do. Buy a new one?
