All of a sudden, very slow drive running latest PD and latest OSX, what to do?

Hi, all has been working great for about 6 months really, and now on this iMac with a fat32 for bootcamp/pd, when PD opens any operation needing drive access starts to crawl...any find file operation or even raxco analyze disk for defrag just takes forever. the drive light on the harddrive icon (yellow/green) hardly flashes. It seems to stall on file operations (like freeze) and then it goes eventually. Not sure what to do. I have a winclone backup of the drive that I can always fall back on, but wondering if there is anything I can do first that is less drastic. Thanks!!!
coocoo

 

Login natively to boot camp and perform the same defragmentation, if there are still problems, it seems to be hardware problem.

 

thanks so much for ur help John, but in bootcamp all is well and very zippy. the harddrive was lightly fragmented so i defragged it, rebooted back into Leopard 10.5.5 and tried again with the same results. It's like PD is constipated when it comes to I/O operations. What to do next? I have a Vista.hdd environment and when I run that, it's really fast...hmmm....
coocoo

ps. If I knew of a way to do a transfer of files and settings from an XP PD to my Vista PD (which is on an external drive) I would just do that and then blow away the bootcamp partition. The only reason I keep it is that I have the XP system there configured the way I need it.

ALSO, while I am in this support loop, is there any hope of firewire support in a PD environment? That's the other reason that I keep bootcamp around, to run Protools LE in PC mode. Thanks for any tips on that!

 

Bellow are some tricks
Hope it helps
1. Set memory for Virtual Machine to less than 1 GB
2. Perform Mac and Windows side disk defragmentation http://www.xvsxp.com/system/system_tools_defrag.php
3. Set Adjust memory limit from Auto to Manual at Parallels Desktop -Preferences-Memory, and set limit a bit more higher than VM memory
4. Disable Themes in Windows XP serives.msc stop Themes service
5. If you are running in Coherence, try to switch to Single Window, or lower Mac resolution
6. Some antivirus software can load CPU when Heuristic Prediction is set, or Tamper protection (Symantec, MacAffey), adjust settings to risk you are supposed, high security settings is not always good idea, as it can also affect software running
7. Run msconfig , and disable unneeded startup items
See http://www.netsquirrel.com/msconfig/msconfig_xp.html
8. Make sure that no VNC,or remote desktop connection is established to Mac, this can slowdown Parallels Desktop
9. Optimize computer experience for best performance
10. Make sure that at least 1.25 GB of Memory is free for Mac OS (it is Total Memory - Virtual Machine Memory)
11. Make sure that at least 2 GB +Virtual Machine assigned memory *2 is available on Mac OS partition where VM is located

 

Ha! I cam up with a trick of my own:
1.winclone the partition just in case.
2. blow it away and start a bootcamp install from scratch.
3. reload all my programs (lordee).
4. boot back to OSX and fire up PD
5. using the same setup, PD re-configured the new bootcamp automatically - very nice.

now it's as zippy as ever, although i lost a day of work.

thanks...have i told u i really like PD?

also, any thoughts on the firewire question?

 

Ps. I have also confirmed that Adobe Ultra CS3 will not boot in PD, but works fine in Bootcamp. Ultra is a video tool that actually is very useful, and not available for the mac at all. So i guess the development team can note that
coocoo

 

We are working on this, but I do not know any ETA on this now

 

Good to know! but also note that Ultra was rolled into Premiere Pro in CS4, so that may cause another problem for ya! cheers, and thx for all ur great support...
coocoo