Hello.

Out of all the years I have been installing 9x Systems, this has never happened to me before but, On one of my old machines I decided to upgrade the Hard Drive from 10 Gb to a 30 Gb Seagate Drive. Anyway I'm half way through installing Windows ME. Untill it gets to the stage of Setting up Plug & Play hardware. It does this fine, reboots & then everything goes so slow it's unusable. I let set up complete. Restarted, booting into Windows took around 5-10 minutes. Weird. So I installed all my drivers. I was about to do Windows Update when I thought it's too slow to start that.

I tried another hard drive, Installed fine & quick & booted fast, So it's not my other hardware. Made me think it must be the drive thats damaged. So I Ran the Drive test tool on Ultimate Boot Cd. Passed. Installed Windows 98 SE On it. Ran Fine, Tried XP on it, Installed & Ran Fine. The Drive according to the tests I did were all error free.

I thought this was strange at this point. So Does anyone know what's causing this, I find this a very strange problem. And It's not my drive at fault, or it seems not. Does anybody know what's going on very strange problem I think, It's not my other hardware as it Installed & Ran fine when I tried another drive. And it's not the drive because the other OS's & Tests I ran were fine.

Of all the years of doing 9x installs I have never seen this before. Does anybody know what's going on?

Edited July 31, 200620 yr by Vinnie

DMA mode has to be enabled for the drive.

In the Device Manager, open the properties for the hard drive, and under Settings ensure DMA is checked.

Okay thanks I should check that. This has never happened before. Strange.