Windows 8 Disk Read Spikes To 100%

I just got Windows 8. I want to install it on a blank drive and keep using my current drive until I get all of my programs reinstalled. Is using two separate Operating Systems possible when they are on different drives? I've never dual booted but I know that it's either always done off one drive or it is rarely done on separate drives.

I've found a lot of info about dual booting with a partition. I haven't found anything about using separate drives.

Does anyone have any experience with the setup I'm describing?

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I've installed the OS and now I get frequent 100% disk usage when my system is only using about 0.5 MB/s.

This really hampers all operations because the entire system becomes unresponsive.

I've done 2 clean installs onto this drive and both instances had the same problem.

I turned off Windows Defender and it seems to have prevented the problem from occurring while the system is idle, but it seems to happen randomly when using any program at any time.

Has anyone encountered this scenario with Windows 8.

Follow the directions for separate partitions but use the new disk. The rule of thumb is to install the latest version of windows last (so if you were going to boot W95 and Vista install w95 then vista)

There's even a Microsoft article on this.

If you've got any kind of recent computer, this should be easy. Disconect power from the old drive, but leave it connected. Add the new drive, connect the power so that it's the only live storage device, and install Win8 there. That will make it completely self-contained. The reconnect power to the old drive.

From then on, you should be able to use your BIOS to choose which drive to boot from.

All the old multiboot stuff was for when BIOSes were stupid, and could boot from only one place. If your BIOS isn't stupid, you can avoid a TON of pain.

Thanks Eezy_Bordone and Malor. I'm pretty sure that my PC is recent enough to handle the method Malor describes.

I will be installing the OS tomorrow morning.

I'm back onto the Vista drive. I don't know why but the drive went through a chkdsk because of inconsistencies. I guess that information that is put on the motherboard or RAM caused it.

Windows 8/8.1 runs very poorly. Whenever I adjust settings for anything or I try to open new tabs in Firefox the Disk goes to 100% usage when only 0.1 MB/s of data is being read or written.

I tried a number of things such as turning off Windows Defender, disabling Superfetch and Windows Search. It seems to have made the spikes less frequent but it hasn't stopped the issue.

This makes me think that either the disk itself has an issue where it is creating errors during installation or there's something in my system that conflicts with Windows 8 and causing the error to occur.

I've tried using monitoring tools that tell me what programs/processes are using the disk. I don't know what to look for within these programs and I know even less about what to do if I find something causing the problem.

Sounds like you might have gotten a bad drive. Do you have another one you could try? (other than your Vista one, of course.)

I have 2 other drives. The thing is that it was my primary drive up until I got a 1TB drive which is what my Vista drive is using.

I guess that it could be too old or was somehow damage when I reformatted it about a week ago.

Oh, another thought: are the drives set in the BIOS to be in AHCI mode? (as opposed to IDE, or RAID?)

If it's running Vista now, I'm not sure whether your system is new enough to have AHCI is an option. You may not be able to find it.

If you're not in AHCI mode, turning that on will probably render both of your existing installs unbootable until you turn it off again. But it would be a good idea to try turning it on, and reinstalling Win8 on the AHCI-mode drive.... just remember you have to turn it off if you want to get into Vista.

If Win8 is still slow with AHCI mode on, then I'd definitely try another drive. Another possibility is that your BIOS might be buggy, and updating that might help.

I will try again tomorrow. Right now I'm so mad at it that I just need to step away.