I have an HP Pavilion desktop model m9400f with AMD Phenom quad-core processor 2.4 GHz and 8 Gb of ram. I am running windows Vista 64 Home Premium. About a month ago, I installed 2 new Seagate Barracuda 3.5" internal 2Tb SATA drives STBD2000101. Despite repeated attempts, I was never able to get these drives to run, so I took the machine and drives to the store where I bought them, and had them clone the drives and install them. Since the machine has returned, it is working, but it is painfully slow. It takes about 15 minutes to reboot. Lightroom seems to behave reasonably until I try to import pictures which takes a very long time. Microsoft Office programs open very slowly, and indicate that they are not responding for a long time. Once they load, everything responds normally.
One drive is partitioned as C: and D: with the D: partition being just under 40Gb. Whenever I try to open this partition the computer hangs, so I decided to reformat that partition, but it will not format. If I do a quick format I get a message after an hour of more that says "Windows was unable to complete the format". If I do a regular format it just goes on for days and days and does not seem to do anything. The other drive is installed as a single partition E:, and seems to be working perfectly.
I have tried to run SeaTools for Windows, but when it opens, it does not display either of the hard drives. It shows only USB drives. I ran the Dos version of SeaTools and did a long scan, but it terminated the first time at 98% and the second time at 99%. Both times, it over wrote the screen with tiny green text that I could not read. I could not view the log file in either case. The second time, my computer made a squealing sound and would not stop until I rebooted.
I have a new copy of Windows 7 and am prepared to install it on this machine, but I really do not want to complicate matters by changing the operating system until I know the hard drive is functioning properly.
I'm no master of this realm by any means, but I can usually work my way through these things with a little help from a Google search. This time, I am getting a bit frazzled. I would appreciate your help.
Thank you
