HDD issue

I just experienced a very disturbing problem with my hard drive. Here it is:
I was away for the weekend and the laptop was on Hibernation for 2 days. I got back and turned it on, yet it would not start working normally - that is the wireless did not connect and the whole machine was abominably slow. I've experienced such problems in the past so I just restarted the laptop. Everything started OK except for the AVG anti-virus which I decided to install last week. It reported some error and did not start. I said "what the heck" and continued with my job without an antivirus. I worked for probably an hour and everything was fine. I even thought my programs opened faster than usual but this may well be because I worked on a slower machine these days. I noticed no problems whatsoever.
So I left it with uTorrent turned on and went out for 1.5 hours. When I got back everything was slow. The HDD spins really slowly - 80gb, Toshiba MK8026GAX 5400 rpm - and the laptop is simply unusable. I restarted a few times, turned it off for some time to let it cool down but no change.
I ran HDD tune and guess what: maximum rate - 1.1 mb/s; it used to be 35 (I'm attaching two screenshots from HDD Tune; the current results are simply...98.5% CPU usage!!).
I ran Diskeeper but it did not detect anything abnormal. I booted in SafeMode, no change. I checked for adware/spyware - nothing visible in taskmanager or msconfig. Now I'm clueless. The only thing I can think of is that the HDD is broken. Yet, why is it still working? Why does it need 99% of the CPU all the time?
What could have possibly caused this? Is the HDD dying (6months old!)? Any ideas?
Thanks,
Vasil

 

Did you check the Transfer mode? Check in Device Manager which transfer mode it is running( should be UDMA 5 ). I was wondering for any reason it went to PIO mode or something like that.

if that is not the case, then try MS Spyware removal tool. The reason why I suspect is, Your anti-virus should be working fine even your HDD is slow( may be slower). Typically some viruses( which are not detectable by standard Anti-Virus) disable Anti-virus first and then start working their way. Even Symantec guys provide separate small programs to deal with those. Check those out.

Anyways, let us know the outcome, so we can think of alternatives.

 

Thank you Chinna,
d*mn, it is PIO! The option for DMA is selected but the current transfer rate is PIO!?
I'm downloading MS spyware to check for some ugly warm...I knew Kaspersky is better than AVG for my network...
I'll post back as soon as I do the spyware thing.

 

Problem solved!
Thank you Chinna, I would have spent days searching for the cause without you guiding me to the PIO transfer mode.
So, I searched for viruses and worms, I found none. Some more googling on the topic suggested that I uninstall the Primary IDE Channel and let Windows reconfigure it. And so it did. Here's a screenshot of how the HDD's ide channel should look like, I hope it helps someone else

 

Congrats!

Generally that is the first thing I check when I see the problem with HDD/DVD speeds.

Good that you are able fix it quickly.