Writing to disk causing CPU to go insane

[Xiathorn]

Whenever I write to disk now, it appears that my first core in my E6600 Core2Duo goes INSANE - 100%. The second core appears to do bugger all.

However, when I check processes it says the System Idle Processes is in the 90s.

This involves copying files from one part of the hard disk to another, anything. It's really crippling.

Funny thing is, I had to reboot my system today because Call of Duty crashed. I hadn't rebooted it in a while - a day at least. Before the reboot, it wasn't having any problems like this at all...at least, on that boot. The boots previously HAD had this problem, except it seemed to be only when installing from disk - installing/copying from an external hard disk didn't seem to matter.

Any ideas, people?

[Anonymous]

[Removed at the request of the author]

[Barley]

I know when I format and re-install XP with my dual core system I have to install a special driver before Windows recognises both cores :)

[Biodoid]

I think that was just for AMD chips though

[mac124]

[quote:b863417246=\"Barley\"]I know when I format and re-install XP with my dual core system I have to install a special driver before Windows recognises both cores :)[/quote:b863417246]

Odd i have never needed to do that on the dual core amd rigs i have built the cpus were always recognised and installed as dual core from the start.

[Biodoid]

they get recognised but it's an optimizer..well they say it is lol

[The Architect]

The last time my CPU maxed out when it was accessing disk was when my HDD was dying and it had switched to PIO instead of DMA - may want to check Programmed IO is not on


Chris.

[Hosser]

If none of this helps, check your jumper settings. This happened to me once. Took literally ten minutes to load a game of Rainbow Six Vegas.

I took off the jumper cap and the performance returned to normal. I had slipped a jumper on to my PATA disk in Slave position as I had just installed a SATA drive, and forgot that SATA drives have their own seperate channels and don't need jumpers to play with PATA drives. :wink:

[Xiathorn]

I've already messed around with the PIO/DMA stuff, and have recently discovered that my DVD-RW is stuck on PIO mode, which I'm not entirely certain it should be.

Ususally I only have problems when installing from a CD/DVD. On ONE occation I had a problem copying stuff internally, and that's not occured again. I'm thinking frak about a bit with the DVD-Drive, try to force it to DMA, and hope that fixes it. I've installed SP2, although that went a bit weird.

In all honesty I think the Hard Disk is probably buggered. A lot of my files appear to be 'corrupted'. I don't want to send it back to Aria ideally, as I had to wait ages for this damn thing, but I don't want to have a £50 disk drive sat here thinking \"Hmm, I'm broken.\"

Yes, I bought a Maxtor. Surely that level of stupidity voids rights I might have had in insisting it worked properly when it arrived.

[Hosser]

Ach, another failure that I intend to lay directly at Maxtor's feet.

Western Digital all the way. They may not be the best performers, but man do they last.