Hardware Tips: Remove Your (CD) Writer's Block

Get Un-Real (Mode)

I just built a new PC. Hating to waste anything, I removed the hard drive from my old, reliable Pentium 90 and installed it as a second drive in my new system running Windows 98. Now the old drive moves like molasses. Transferring data from one hard drive to the other is slower than writing to a floppy disk. What can I do to speed up my older disk?

Robert Vail, Jacksonville, Florida

Sounds like a bad case of real-mode drivers. One of Win 95's big improvements was protected-mode operation, which allots each program its own protected segment of memory. Previously, under the real-mode operations of Windows 3. x and DOS, programs had to share a small, unprotected memory segment, which frequently caused conflicts and crashes.

To maintain backward compatibility with old DOS programs, Win 95 and 98 still work in real mode. If Windows does not recognize an older hard drive or can't find a protected-mode driver for it, the OS tries to use a compatible real-mode driver. Real-mode drivers use real-mode memory management, which is very slow.

To check your old drive, select Start, Settings, Control Panel and double-click the System icon. Select the Performance tab, and under both File System and Details look to see if you're using MS-DOS compatibility mode).

Try installing protected-mode drivers, if your drive vendor has them available. You can still use the drive without protected-mode drivers, though it may be suitable only for archival storage, not for running applications or anything requiring frequent disk accesses.

For most people, the storage capacity gained from slaving a vintage drive to a much newer, faster, and higher-capacity drive simply isn't worth the trouble. The wisest approach is to attach the drive temporarily to copy any data you may want and then remove the old drive from the system.