Gaming Vista is acting like an ass.

[Westside]

For a long time, on my old IDE HDD, Vista X64 ran fine and fast and really well with my Q6600 4Gig ram and Geforce 8800GT. Recently when I moved up to a SATA HDD, ever since installation, I can actually FEEL the instability of the OS. Drivers giving me problems, BSOD and such... Anyone know why? The only thing I changed was my hard drive, which I clean formatted, but how would this do anything?

 

[JKR Firefox]

For a long time, on my old IDE HDD, Vista X64 ran fine and fast and really well with my Q6600 4Gig ram and Geforce 8800GT. Recently when I moved up to a SATA HDD, ever since installation, I can actually FEEL the instability of the OS. Drivers giving me problems, BSOD and such... Anyone know why? The only thing I changed was my hard drive, which I clean formatted, but how would this do anything?

Are you certain that the HD you bought is Vista Compatible?

For some reason, M$ decided they would be more of an ass and make drivers which were only stable when used with Vista. This is a real pain for anyone who dislikes the OS enough to re-install XP. When I did that, drivers behaved abnormally and failed for no reason whatsoever. Perhaps this is the case here as well.

 

[Westside]

For a long time, on my old IDE HDD, Vista X64 ran fine and fast and really well with my Q6600 4Gig ram and Geforce 8800GT. Recently when I moved up to a SATA HDD, ever since installation, I can actually FEEL the instability of the OS. Drivers giving me problems, BSOD and such... Anyone know why? The only thing I changed was my hard drive, which I clean formatted, but how would this do anything?

Are you certain that the HD you bought is Vista Compatible?

For some reason, M$ decided they would be more of an ass and make drivers which were only stable when used with Vista. This is a real pain for anyone who dislikes the OS enough to re-install XP. When I did that, drivers behaved abnormally and failed for no reason whatsoever. Perhaps this is the case here as well.

I have a pretty new HDD, it's a ST3500320AS made by Seagate, 500GB drive. I thought it would perform well actually...

 

[JKR Firefox]

For a long time, on my old IDE HDD, Vista X64 ran fine and fast and really well with my Q6600 4Gig ram and Geforce 8800GT. Recently when I moved up to a SATA HDD, ever since installation, I can actually FEEL the instability of the OS. Drivers giving me problems, BSOD and such... Anyone know why? The only thing I changed was my hard drive, which I clean formatted, but how would this do anything?

Are you certain that the HD you bought is Vista Compatible?

For some reason, M$ decided they would be more of an ass and make drivers which were only stable when used with Vista. This is a real pain for anyone who dislikes the OS enough to re-install XP. When I did that, drivers behaved abnormally and failed for no reason whatsoever. Perhaps this is the case here as well.

I have a pretty new HDD, it's a ST3500320AS made by Seagate, 500GB drive. I thought it would perform well actually...

Perhaps I'm wrong then. If it's a newer HD, it should be compatible.

 

[Westside]

Well, it's working all right at this point. I finished installing all the drivers. However, now I will have a hard time trusting this guy... My old HDD that I installed this system on was an OLD ass wester digital, like more than 3 years. It ran extremely stable, I was surprised that it was even Vista...

F##king outstanding, my computer froze completely again. This time I was trying to transfer files... Is there a way to completely format this clean to make sure? When I install Vista, it gave me an option to format, which took about 30 seconds... I know that a good format for a 500GB drive takes much longer than that...

 

[Saylient_Dreams]

You can try using gparted to format it, then reinstall windows again on it. I think Vista is going to be slow at first cause of its "superfetch" thing. It's suppose to learn what programs you use often and such. But it should still be stable, so I'm guessing it isn't that that's causing it to freeze up and such. If formating still doesn't work, I'd look at getting that HDD exchanged, might just be defective.

 

[Richy Freeway]

Test the hard drive. You can download a CD image of Seagates diagnostics software from their website.

 

[Westside]

You can try using gparted to format it, then reinstall windows again on it. I think Vista is going to be slow at first cause of its "superfetch" thing. It's suppose to learn what programs you use often and such. But it should still be stable, so I'm guessing it isn't that that's causing it to freeze up and such. If formating still doesn't work, I'd look at getting that HDD exchanged, might just be defective.

I got it as a gift a month ago, haven't used it until now, which is past the exchange date for the store I bought it in.

Is there a way of checking HDD's stability and such?

Oops, just read the post above me. Is the thing called seatools it?
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools

 

[Richy Freeway]

You're on the right track there. To save you the trouble, here's the direct link.

http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/Se...sDOS207EURO.iso

Burn it to a disc, then boot from it.

There's a good chance that even if the drive is out of the shop warranty, you'll be able to send it back to Seagate for replacement. It should have 3yrs cover from Seagate.

 

[Westside]

Ok, if the drive is ok, and it maybe corrupt files causing problems. I want to COMPLETE format it for Vista 64. What would be the best way and software. I have Norton Partition Magic.

 

[Richy Freeway]

Just do a quick format with the Vista disk. People talk about the amazing "full format" like it's some sort of miracle cure.

A format is a format. Writing zeroes to the drive or doing a slow normal format isn't going to make any difference at all.

Once you've done the format, the Vista installer will treat it like a blank drive regardless of how you formatted it.

 

[Westside]

One thing I would like to point out though. I've done one major change to my system. My RAM was originally configured incorrectly as single channel RAM, I changed it to dual channel.

 

[AshuraZro]

One thing I would like to point out though. I've done one major change to my system. My RAM was originally configured incorrectly as single channel RAM, I changed it to dual channel.

When I built this computer, I suffered major crashes and errors with my first motherboard when I had my ram in dual channel. The board was defective of course but if you feel ram could be the issue, burn and run Memtest. That should rule it out or at least find what potentially may be the problem (the ram or the motherboard).

 

[Saylient_Dreams]

You could try setting it back to single channel, maybe the other stick of ram you put in could be the culprit in the file transfer freezes. You should be able to do a full format with any partition software really, I would try using something from seagate if they have something to do that with. The only benefit of a full format is if it doesn't format in a full format, then there's something wrong with the HDD. As Rick Freeway said, there should be a manufacturer's warranty on that, so you should be able to exchange it directly from seagate instead of the shop you got it from.

 

[zidane_genome]

Make sure your BIOS settings are showing your HD as SATA... if it is, try setting it to legacy support (it will make vista think and act as if it's an EIDE ATA drive)

If your looking for a way to completely wipe your drive, http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ has a tool that wipes per DoD standards, and even higher (20+ 0 wipes)... that'll destroy EVERYTHING on the drive, and the only way to get it back would be with an electron microscope.

 

[Javacat]

Does your motherboard have multiple SATA controllers? (normally one set controlled by something in the BIOS and then another one controlled by some dedicated thing). If you're not sure, when your PC is booting up you'll normally see the main POST stuff from the BIOS, then it'll go to a black screen and might try detecting something and mention RAID and after that it'll go into Vista. If it does you could try switching the drive to the other controller. You may be able to get away with just swapping the cable to check whether it works better, although a format would probably be better.

You could also try flashing your BIOS to the latest version and make sure you've got all of the proper SATA controller drivers installed.

 

[juggernaut911]

first gparted is a linux program, second, isnt like XP where it says full or quick reformat?