Where to start?

I have an HP Laptop with a Toshiba MK8025GAS HDD 80G
Celeron M 512MB

As of about 3 weeks ago I started having sound distortion and no matter what I have tried nothing seems to work. I have done sytem checks and sound checks and all seem to say the hardware is fine.

I am currently running Active SMART as I thought something might be seriously wrong with the HD but it seems fine except for the 10 bad blocks.

As of about 2 weeks ago everything started to slow down and lag. My startup which usually takes a little over a minute now seems to take 5 or more. Even the start up jingle is distorted.

I have run a chkdisk and it seemed to really get held up on part 4.

When I ran chkdsk on my Toshiba MK8025gas:\r\n
CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 5)...
File verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 5)...
Index verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying security descriptors (stage 3 of 5)...
Security descriptor verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying file data (stage 4 of 5)...
The disk does not have enough space to replace bad clusters

This began scrolling and I believe went into the 10's of thousands before I went to bed

What to do next?

Clean up the hard drive to free up space then run chkdsk /r again.

See here for a good tutorial on doing this, courtesy of Moi`. How to clean up your hard drive to increase free space NOW!

First of all thanks for the reply, Rich. 'Ztrucker'

I did go through the full tutorial on cleaning up my harddrive and it does seem to help with general performance. And did the chkdsk and it said everything was clean on the harddrive.

I am still experiencing the same problem as before.

A slower than usual startup, a general computer lag and a sound and video lag. I will continue to delete a few programs and downloads I don't need and try some new video downloads and see how they play.

I hope someone can help with this problem.

Let's check and see what transfer mode your hard drive is running in. I should be DMA 4 or 5.

Right click on My Computer and choose Properties. Click the Hardware tab, then the Device Manager button. In the list of devices, expand (click +) IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers. In the expanded list, right click on Primary IDE channel and choose Properties...click on the Advanced Settings tab in the resulting window. This should open a window with one or more devices listed and show the transfer mode information for each.

Above posted by wannabe1 on GeeksToGo: Help badly neded...(RESOLVED, A MASSIVE THANKS TO WANNABE1)

If it's running in PIO mode that will have a significant negative impact on your system performance. If this is the case, download and run ForceDMAMode.vbs by clicking on the Here link in this web page. Then reboot and check DMA mode again, see if it stays set.

If not, it's almost always caused by the hard drive reporting too many errors so XP drops to PIO mode for data saftey reasons. That means it's time to look at getting a replacement drive.

Before doing that, I would go to the hard drive manufacturers web site and download their diagnostic utility. It will be a bootable CD .iso image which you would use to create a bootable CD from. Then you boot the CD and run the hard drive test and see what it reports.

Hey 'Ztruker' Thanks a million!! It just kind of amazes me of how just like with a car it can be something so small that can get everything back to normal. I am just curious why it switches over.

I currently have Active SMART Running on my computer (I assume this is a reasonably good monitoring program for the hard drive) and it reports that both Disk Health and Performance are 'Good'. My Temp Avg. is 39 Celcius with a high of 50 Celcius and 10 bad blocks.

I know my problem is resolved and thanks but if you can just offer some advice and thougts on why my computer would go all the way from Ultra DMA Mode 5 to PIO only and what I should watch out for in the future.

Again Thanks Ztruker and also to Wannabe1

As I said, it's almost always caused by the hard drive reporting too many errors so XP drops to PIO mode for data safety reasons.

Download and run the hard drive manufacturers utility (available as a .iso file from their web site normally) and see if that reports any problems. If not, chalk it up as another mystery.

In any case, keep an eye on it to see if it reverts again.

Thank you SO MUCH for this post! I've been trying for weeks to figure out why my computer's sound was laggy and glitchy. Finally realized tonight it was probably the computer and the sound was just the main symptom. After hours of trying to find nonexistent viruses, I finally found this page and discovered that my primary IDE channel was running as PIO. I now recall an issue that was probably right before this started happening where for various reasons there were multiple failed boots in a row. I bet that stuck the channel into PIO. It seems to be working fine now!

I was about to give up and figure I would just have to deal with the laggy sound issues until I could get a new computer. Thanks so much again!

Glad it helped, and thank you for letting me know.