SMARTDRV = makes any and all drivers faster.

Have you checked your BIOS settings? 😀

This is normal and expected from drives of that era.

Considering as a fact that...

Tr3vor42532 wrote:

It wasn't this slow before,

I would recommend a surface scan with scandisk or even better using the manufacturer's utility to identify potential fatal problems

I did do a surface scan and ran it with spinrite, and everything is fine according to that.

I'm in the process of reinstalling dos to make sure I didn't mess anything up in the autoexec and config files, and wow, this thing wants to put up a fight today. Memmaker is just not having it today. When it was running and doing its thing, restarting my computer and editing stuff, my computer gave me "hard disk errors". when memmaker stoped trying to fix things up, everything went back to normal.
seems to be doing better, so I must have done something before. Before it seemed that smartdrv was making games load faster, but run slower and when it was off games ran faster but loaded very slow.

Ugh, now CTCM seems to be freezing on boot >.> Computer, why are you doing this 😵
one restart later, it works 😐

Sounds like it may be failing. If anything is important is on it, back it up

Another spinrite scan done, still no bad sectors, no little errors either.

I wonder if its an IRQ conflict or something, I did swap out the soundcard yesterday, but it retains the same IRQ, DMA and I/O as the last one, so its probably not that.

Do you use a VLB motherboard.. And which processor are you using now?? Maybe the VLB bus is overloaded or something with your controller card. So that the way to get data corruption.. Maybe thats why your harddisk is so slow?

Sometimes I/O chipsets / buses fail. Happened to me with an integrated MOBO one time. I recycled it. 😀 Good luck!

I don't know why, but today it shaped up. It ran Memmaker like 3 times without complaining. I did reseat the IDE cables, so maybe that had something to do with it. Memmaker was the only thing last night that caused it to flip out, it did everything else just fine, games, windows, etc.

I do run a VLB board, but only the SVGA card is VLB (this card is a giant prick), the I/O card is just a regular old 16 bit ISA card.
Also, I have a DX2-66.

Did you try a different IDE cable? Sometimes one or more connectors on the crimped end of IDE cables makes unreliable contact after much pulling and reconnecting to devices. Have you tried a low-level format of the HDD? I seem to recall 386 BIOSes having this option. I once had an issue with a SCSI HDD whereby an apparent loose fitting power connector was the culprit, although there were no signs of it being very loose. I ended up soldering on new connectors to the PSU.