[ Outline ] · Standard · Linear+ WINXP all CPU usage

Hey, I am trying to get my desktop up and running, but for some reason the system slows to a crawl.

it is a AMD 1.2, 768md sdram, 30gig hd, radeon9000 pro.

in the taskmanager, two things alternate between the 99% of CPU usage.

Services.exe and lsass.exe

any ideas why?

Boss,

A couple of things to note:

If you are having trouble simply formatting, then it is likely your HD has physical problems. Either you have disk errors on the platters themselves, or the drive controller is failing (a common cause of HD failure).

Without the proper equipment you can't test the controller, but you can test for disk errors. Whenever I install/reinstall on an older drive I use Partition Magic to delete any existing partitions - then let PM create and format the new partition as it will thoroughly test it during creation.

The best tool on the planet for diagnosing and repairing HD errors is SpinRite by Steve Gibson (Gibson Research).
http://www.grc.com/sroverview.htm

SpinRite fits on a boot floppy, so you can run it on a drive without having to remove the HD and put it in another system. NOTE: Since SpinRite thoroughly tests every single bit on your HD it can take many hours to run the first time.

One last caveat: SpinRite does not currently support the NTFS file system. So if you partition your drive with Partition Magic using FAT32, you can then boot to floppy and run SpinRite.

Best of luck,
ManX

Edit: we can't have that now can we.....

This post has been edited by DutchKid: Apr 22 2004, 10:15 PM