Hi everyone, So, over the past 2 days or so windows has been booting very slowly i.e 5-6 minutes to get to enter your password. (i'm running an ssd which usually boots within 5-10 seconds). So anyway, windows just froze on me. I rebooted my computer and after the bios msg it came up with "no hard drives found". Again I rebooted my computer. It eventually found the hdd, and proceeded to load windows (taking 5-6 minutes). I entered my PIN and windows just went to a black screen. Could it also possibly be the motherboard? I would like everyone's thoughts on this and if it is ssd, will I be able to recover settings and data?
Take a look at the smart table to see if there's something unusual: ie. Sata crc errors, low health... It can reveal the source of the problem. Usually when a SSD fails the cause is a faulty PSU. Anyway, try this: Open a command prompt with admin privileges. Type "chkdsk /f". It will ask yes or no. Hit Y and reboot. If problem persists then try this, again in the command prompt: "sfc /scannow"
Thanks, will try. Got it to boot finally, restarted a couple of times before it loaded windows, then it ran windows repair. I have disconnected all other hdd's and just booted on the drive with windows to check if something else is the problem. If I still have problems, I will replace the hdd and ghost over windows. The ssd is over 5 years old anyway.
Hi there As first I would try put SSD to other or another SATA port,if you have spare HDD then I would try to install there Windows and test SSD if does have any SMART errors,try HD Tune or many others there Second option is download LiveCD something like is Knoppix or many others,which have HDD testing tools Regarding recovering failed HDD,I've recovered several HDD with TestDisk tools etc,but not SSD,on this I'm not sure there Hope this helps Thanks,Jura
Found the problem (eventually!) It seems that one of my VERY old sata 1Tb hdd's has loads of bad sectors on it and the health of the drive is below 10%. Bought new drive and attempting to copy data across but it's taking forever. Have to leave it copy overnight. At least my boot drive is OK and I don't have to reinstall windows. I should have realised that the hdd was failing when it disappeared from my computer a couple of times and then suddenly reappeared. Silly me!
and for some reason windows wanted to use that drive so bad it took 6min to load, maybe it was the page file drive? what other excuse could it have, you should've had noticed though
It was probably trying to enumerate everything on boot and can't read the drive so it was pausing while that went on.Don't forget when you open file explorer it is right there because it has already been enumerated otherwise it would take several seconds to open.So it doesn't really have to be actively using the drive for it to cause problems on boot.
