Recently had a computer shop ghost a 40GB hard drive over to an 80GB hard drive.
After booting it up at home, it takes roughly 8 minutes to boot into XP (running SP2, but the specs on my machine are irrelevant as you’ll see in a moment).
After it does finally boot, it takes another 3-5 minutes to login and “settle.” Things like selecting with the cursor are instant, but tasks such as opening the Start menu require nearly 30 seconds. NOTE: CPU usage is 2% or 0% at this point! The HD read light, on the other hand, is going CRAZY.
After around 5 minutes of settling in, it is usable with not much lag. Almost as if it has to “burn in” each boot. Reading files such as MP3’s is a disaster at first. It takes a minute to load and skipping around the song requires another 5 second load. Again, these symptoms seem to fade after a while.
Here’s the rub. I stuck the original 40GB HD in, and it boots up instantly (20 seconds max). Things read quickly, it works perfectly. What happened? This isn’t anti-virus software, etc. etc. This 80 GB HD is a ghost/mirror of the 40, so what’s going on? Nothing has changed except a ghost to the 80.
(Note: They’re both Hitachi HD’s, 7200 rpm, just a 40GB increase on one).
Any and all help is MUCH appreciated!