All of a sudden my D and E drives have been VERY slow to read any kind of disc I put in them. When I click om My Computer, D or E drive, I get the "hour glass of death". This can last up to 5 minutes before it starts reading any disc! If I click out of My Computer while the hour glass is displayed I get the "Not Responding" message. It is VERY frustrating because it has worked fine up until now. I can uninstall the drivers and it will re install on restart, work fine once, then return to it's altered state. The only software I can remember installing recently is IE7. Any Ideas?

Thanks,

jfire

This could be anything. A few questions :

1) How full is your hard disk
2) Did you by any chance do anything about the firmware of your drives

Try the following :

a) Get the latest drivers for these machines DO NOT INSTALL
Go to my computer rightclick propperties hardware and first uninstall the drivers and secondly completely remove these drives.
c) Reboot and than exdcute the add harddware wizzard and let us know how you are doing

Just to throw a monkey wrench into the works - I've recently seen several high end HP's with speed issues. Most of the issues have been traced to active seeking of drives that don't exist. While this doesn't seem to relate to the drives that are detected - by experimentation it was seen to be so.

So, if you've got empty channels in your BIOS - set them to "None" rather than "Auto" - that way the controller doesn't waste time looking for the devices.

FYI - On my old system, this was the case (no IDE hard drives), and with the couple of HP's I've seen it's been the same (no IDE hard drives). This could be related to the drive seeking in general, or it could relate to seeking boot drives on the primary IDE channel. I dunno!

How do I check my bios for empty drives?? My hard drive is fine (25% full). I have uninstalled the drivers and windows XP installs them again on reboot with the same results. Both D & E drives have the same problems!

To check for empty drives you first have to know what drives that you have in your system. Open up the case and have a look (don't touch - static could cause problems) and see what actual drives are in the system. Generally you'll find one hard drive and one or two CD/DVD drives.

First, and most important, locate the instructions on how to reset your BIOS to default values. This way, if an incorrect choice is made (and your system doesn't work), you'll be able to reset your BIOS to the default and get back into Windows.

Then, in your BIOS, look for those drives that you spotted - they should have been identified by the BIOS alread (but may have cryptic names). The remainder of the items may be marked Auto - but show no device. Those are the one's to set to "None". Then reboot and see if that fixes the speed issue.