Computer help please! All programs suddenly loading VERY slowly

Factual Questions
1

Hope there’s some computer-savvy Dopers awake out there who can help me. My computer is a 2.8ghz / 1GB ram machine with 2 h/ds (160gb & 200gb, both Maxtor) plus DVD/CDR and DVD-R drives, ZIP 250, (all internal), P/S mouse & keyboard, running Windows XP (Service Pack 1). All of a sudden tonight, it just started acting weird.

It began when my Mom called me up and asked me to identify a Harry Potter character on the web. She gave me the URL for an IMDB page but for some reason it wasn’t working – IE said, “Cannot find server” and Firefox wouldn’t even attempt to load the page. I exited Firefox and tried to restart it, but the program immediately crashed. Tried again, several times, crash. (Using Netscape Agent to report the error did nothing.) Reboot computer, Firefox still crashed. By that time Mom had figured out herself that the character was Hagrid, and I jokingly blamed her for breaking my computer. She blamed Satan.

Anyway, I reboot my computer but Firefox still wouldn’t load, so I downloaded the newest version and installed it, and it worked. (I mention all this because it may or may not be related – Firefox had been acting funky with IMDB for a few days, but the sudden crashing problem was something new.)

Ok…several hours later, I’m running a few programs and notice that a few things are running unusually slow. In particular, those little “preview” boxes that appear when you hover the mouse over an SDMB thread, took a very long time to show up, much longer than they should. When I tried to open Microsoft Word, it took such a LONG time to load that I cancelled it with Task Manager (which also loaded very slow.) Thinking something had gone screwy somewhere, I decided to reboot again (which, normally, tends to fix a lot of slowdown problems.)

Reboot ran fine until it reached the blue screen after the WinXP splash screen. It hung for almost five minutes before the password box showed up, and after that over 20 minutes to load everything else. And every program was still loading very slow.

Reboot in Safe Mode – still slow.

Reboot with Last Known Good Configuration – still slow. (In fact I didn’t let it load all the way, just restart again once the password box finally appeared.)

Reboot in Safe Mode w/ System Restore, attempted to restore to the auto-backup point five days ago. This took over half an hour, and ultimately SysRes said “CANNOT RESTORE TO SEPT. 26th” But at least I got the O/S up and running.

Ran a few progs, and here’s the weird thing. While every program takes eternity to load (approx. 10-20 times longer than normal) once it’s loaded, the program runs perfectly. (Except one…I’ll get to that.) Tested Firefox, Windows Explorer, Nero, Windows Media Player (classic version) and some small games like Zuma Deluxe, all worked fine except for the extreme load time.

Did another virus/spyware scan, no problems.

Ran Executive Diskeeper to try and defrag the hard drive…and here’s where it got interesting. Analyzing drive C: (system drive) took AGES, nearly half an hour. But it was weird, it took several minutes to reach 6%, then jumped quickly to 10%, lagged again until 13%, jumped again to 20%, and on like that until 38% each time drawing a tiny sliver of data on the Drive Map. After 39%, it went back to normal speed and analyzed the rest of the drive in a few seconds. (The results looked normal, and I saved 'em in case anyone wants to see 'em…I know my MFT is a bit fragmented, and I was starting to think that’s the problem, but I don’t dare touch it in case it blows the whole works!!)

Analyzing drive D: (storage/backup only) took the normal length of time, less than 2 seconds.

Now, I’m baffled. My guess is that it’s some kind of system malfunction, but the Diskeeper results made me worry that the HD is actually going bad. But if that’s the case, why would it only affect program load times? There’s no problem at all with reading/writing to the hard drive, from text files to 800mb movies.

Oh, and the START menu is lagging horrifically…at least, until the icons/titles load, then it has no problem. And in a few programs, when a pop-up window appears (i.e. “Are you sure you want to delete this file?”) it also lags hard.

At this point, I’m stuck. What should I try next? (I don’t dare reboot again or shut down again until I figure out what’s wrong!!!)

2

Oh my, another thing I just noticed – certain directories, like Nero and Adobe Paint Shop Pro, appear to be completely empty. In fact, when I tried to access the Program Files/Adobe folder directly, a popup said, “The Disc in drive C: is not formatted, would you like to format now?” THE HELL??? What is going on?

3

Make that, a LOT of program folders are suddenly empty, including Quicktime, ATI Control Panel, and Creative Labs…and a few tell me the drive is unformatted when I try and access them.

4

Holy shit, can’t give any specific advise other than to run all the usual scans/fixes for virus/trojan/worm infection which I would presume you will have already done considering the circumstances leading to your problem. All that stuff is in the sticky thread as you are certainly aware.
Comisserations and fingers crossed for a solution.

5

you could also try a restore point from before the troubles hit. That’s worked for me before.

6

Have you run ChkDsk yet?

7

Is your hard drive failing? Make a backup of all important data now.

8

Tried that already, failed twice.

Wow, didn’t know you could chdsk from My Computer. (The command-line method never worked very well for me.) Ok…just ran it (diagnose only, no error fixes), and Chkdsk said “failed to complete the check.” Ouch.

That does seem to be the prime suspect…already I’ve backed up everything vital onto D:, except for 70GB of rare music concerts that aren’t going to all fit. Gonna have to make some hard decisions…

Man this sucks. First my house nearly burns down in the Topanga Brush Fire, and now this. :mad:

9

Run Maxtor’s Maxblast utility. If there are unrepairable problems it will give you a diagnostic code which you can supply when requesting a warranty replacement.

10

I concur that your hard drive is going south. Don’t reboot the computer any more – you’re on borrowed time now, and one of these times the drive powers down it won’t be able to power up again.

Assuming you’re going to replace the drive, you might consider getting an external firewire (or USB 2) enclosure for the new drive. This would let you hook the new drive up to the machine “hot” - and copy what you can off of the existing one. You can then shut everything down, take the new drive out of the enclosure, and put it in the computer. The extra enclosure should only run you $50-$100 or so, and you can use it in the future if you ever buy another drive to put in it.

11

HDDs are cheap.

12

Is it possible to set up a USB drive as the primary system drive? I was thinking of doing that as an interim solution until I find a more permanent replacement for the main hard drive.

(I did manage to back up everything…watched some of those movie files, and the choices of what to keep became a bit less hard than I expected. ;))

13

It depends on your BIOS. Really modern motherboard/BIOS combinations seem to all be able to boot from USB, but older ones are hit or miss. Look around in the BIOS for something that lets you specify boot orders, and see if USB is listed. That’s not 100% certain, though – I’ve got a system that lists USB, but can’t actually do it, and I’ve seen systems which don’t list USB, but will boot off it as though it were a floppy.

An easy way to tell, if you’ve got a flash drive and access to a system which can boot into DOS (real DOS, not the XP/2000 fake one): do a “format /s” of the flash drive (warning, you’ll lose everything on it), then see if you can boot off it.

14

Thanks all you guys for your help. I’ve arranged to pick up a pre-loaded Maxtor SATA drive from a friend who has nearly the same setup as I do, so I should be back up and running in due time. Has anyone here used SATA? Is it reliable?

15

I’ve seen no especial problems with SATA drives. As I said earlier, drives are cheap, so if your PC supports RAID 1 (mirroring), then I suggest you get a second identical drive and mirror the primary.

16

Damn and I thought I had problems …good luick man hope you get it running smoother. You need serious tech help I mean serious.

17

While I’m sure there are many good programs on the market, I’ve found Ontrack’s Easy Recovery Pro was far and away the easiest and most thorough home recovery tool. Be aware, however that it can be so thorough that it pick up fragments or old copies of files (this is probably less of a problem with large AVI files) You may have a bit of sorting out to do – weeding out the shorter, corrupted, or identical copies – but it’s a lot better than losing the data altogether.

I copy the recovered files to DVD-R (cheap!) before doing my “weeding out” because it’s tedious, and I get steadily less careful about what I throw out over time. I’m always amazed how many small forgotten documents I wish I hadn’t discarded – files actually worth searching the recovery DVDs for (which is enough of a pain that I don’t do it lightly) Your Data May Vary.

18

Old trick - revives harddrives for a very short time (can be done a few times, but it hastens the failure in the end)… stick the drive in a ziplock back, get as much air out as you can and seal it. Stick it in the freezer for an hour.

Take it to your PC and plug it in (don’t bother hooking it to the case, just hang it there). Copy all the data you can and go from there.

I’d highly suggest shutting that computer down NOW, getting a new HDD, format it, get windows installed, install the dying HD as a secondary drive and copy the data off of it ASAP.

Most likely issue here is the head physically crashed into the disk platter. Freezing it will cause the metal to shrink slightly, hence lifting the head off the disk if it’s dragging.

19

If the drive’s running and reading anything, the head isn’t crashed into the platter (or at least isn’t still there). The spinning of the drive itself creates a Bernoulli effect that holds the head off the platter. Take away that spin, and you might or might not be able to get it going again. As you point out, this only works if you can get a new drive available quickly, and without shutting the machine down.

The freezing trick should be your method of last recourse - if you can still get any data off the drive, do it BEFORE you try freezing it. Sometimes freezing it works, sometimes it causes (frozen) condensation which will kill it the rest of the way.

20

No need to worry about the data guys – everything vital has been backed up.

I’m curious, though, about what might have caused the problem. We just had a major brush fire sweep through this area, and even with the windows closed and the A/C running full blast, there’s lots of smoke and ash everywhere still. Also, for about a day and a half up to and during the fire, my house has been experiencing intermittent power dips…not so much a SURGE as a DIP. Like, the lights would dim for a split second, and then come back on. It didn’t seem to affect anything at all, didn’t even reset the clocks, except it did knock my DVR/cable box offline which had to be unplugged before it would restart. Of course I have the computer plugged into a surge protector…but could that have caused the problem? Or could it have been just coincidence?