Im fixing a laptop for a friend, its jam packed with crap basically and it takes about 10 minutes to start, programs not much shorter. It hasn't been maintained at all in years so my plan was to backup all the files, reinstall Vista and put the files back. Theres about 40GB of data to backup, I first tried to copy this data to my External USB HDD but the copy speed was between 1MB/s and 2MB/s and kept failing due to corrupt files. I then tried in safe mode, the laptop booted and ran alot quicker but the copy speed was the same. I then took the HDD out of the laptop and put in an external caddy, copying the files to my PC is running at the same speed. Its going to take a couple more hours to finish copying but once its done is there anything I can do to speed the drive up before putting it back in the laptop? Of course, im going to do a full reformat. The laptop is an old Toshiba Equim model (Pentium D, 2GB Ram) running Vista and the HDD is a 2.5" Hitachi 2.5" 120GB.
Is it copying slowly because it's stuffed full of bad sectors? Doesn't sound healthy to me, it should be able to exceed 2MB/s without anything running (i.e. in the caddy). I'd get a copy of UBCD and run some drive fitness tests.
