Computer is unstable and hard drive use is locked at 100%

CursedDog19 · March 9, 2019

-Windows 10-

On March 1st I woke up to see that my computer had crashed. The boot was slower than normal, displaying a black, pixelated spinning wheel screen after the normal windows logo spinning wheel screen. The login process was noticeably slower. After logging in, the lag continued, so I opened task manager. The everything looked normal except the disk usage, which was locked at 100%. After investigating further, the computer became unresponsive except for my ability to move the mouse. A box appeared in the bottom left corner to end an unresponsive process. I clicked end process and the entire screen went black, a minute later it blue-screened with the error “critical process died.” Here are things I have tried:

-Attempting two different system restore points, both failed to complete

-Rolling back the Nvidia driver

-Running DDU to uninstall the driver

-Attempting to boot w/o graphics card, I could not get past the BIOS screen

-Running system maintenance (failed to find issue)

-Running DISM from the command prompt debug ( X: )

I believe the issue is coming from the disk being at 100% until system crash

Streetguru · March 9, 2019

25 minutes ago, iUseFlexTape said:

Just reinstall windows?

If you still have an issue probably replace the hard drive

homeap5 · March 9, 2019

Do not made any reinstall before you'll be sure that your hdd is good.

soulreaper11207 · March 10, 2019

Check the disk health first. Reboot the machine into your recovery environment. Scan the drive that windows is installed in by using disk part to list the Volumes, exit disk part, and then use dir driveletter for each volume. The one that lists the windows folder is your boot/primary drive. Then take that drive letter and plug it into check disk: chkdsk /r driveletter. This will flag and try to recover any bad sectors on the drive. Once it is complete, Reboot. Then at your log on screen, click the power button, hold shift, and click restart. Once you get the Choose an Option, select Troubleshoot, Advanced, Start-up Settings, and Restart. This will give you a start up settings page. Press 5 key. Windows will then restart into Safe mode. Once logged in, go grab Adware, Hitmanpro, and the free kaspersky scan tool. Run these. If the don't find anything, open up your system config app, change the boot settings to Selected start up and uncheck the start up items, and then reboot. If you dont see any issues after this, more than likely you either had a bad sector or a greed start up program. But If this is still having issues, you might have to refresh your installation of windows.

CursedDog19 · March 10, 2019

1 hour ago, soulreaper11207 said:

Check the disk health first. Reboot the machine into your recovery environment. Scan the drive that windows is installed in by using disk part to list the Volumes, exit disk part, and then use dir driveletter for each volume. The one that lists the windows folder is your boot/primary drive. Then take that drive letter and plug it into check disk: chkdsk /r driveletter. This will flag and try to recover any bad sectors on the drive. Once it is complete, Reboot. Then at your log on screen, click the power button, hold shift, and click restart. Once you get the Choose an Option, select Troubleshoot, Advanced, Start-up Settings, and Restart. This will give you a start up settings page. Press 5 key. Windows will then restart into Safe mode. Once logged in, go grab Adware, Hitmanpro, and the free kaspersky scan tool. Run these. If the don't find anything, open up your system config app, change the boot settings to Selected start up and uncheck the start up items, and then reboot. If you dont see any issues after this, more than likely you either had a bad sector or a greed start up program. But If this is still having issues, you might have to refresh your installation of windows.

I found the issue to be the drive itself. Used a cloning utility to copy the files onto a temporary drive which took about 2.5 hours. Everything works good now! Planning on purchasing a Samsung 970 evo m.2 drive for the long term. Thanks!