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I know I got corrupted files on my PC, I just can't isolate them.

C

Chaotic0ne

Member
My PC went from 35 sec boot times to 1:30 sec boot times, and from all the programs I've installed to scan for malware or repair hard drives, each making a restore point; I don't have a restore point earlier than yesterday, so I'm screwed there. I got a PC from 1997 that will boot up faster than this one. No joke.

I need something that will scan my entire C drive, not just windows files and isolate any corrupted data, and either repair or delete it. I've tried chkdsk, sfc /scannow, and even HDD regenerator, which came back with 0s across the board. Is there a driver utility out there that will scan my drivers to see if any are corrupted? I couldn't find one that would do something that specific. I got way too many to be manually uninstalling/reinstalling.

I tried to do a windows repair installation and it failed. I tried windows boot fix, and it listed as there being some sort of error that couldn't be repaired, but didn't give me enough information.

I had a few blue screens from unstable OCs, and a boot failure or 2, which is why I think either a driver or some other non-essential windows file is screwing up my boot times. Safe mode increased the boot time by a little bit, but its nowhere near as good as I had before.

I've ran Avast pre-boot scan, AVG, Adaware, Malwarebytes, none of them came back with anything, so I'm done scanning for malware. It has to be something else.

**Edit - I uninstalled Intel RST the other day, and that wouldn't have anything to do with horrendous boot times, would it? I used to have an SSD until it went bad, but currently all I'm running is a mechanical HDD.

Here is a HDD benchmark I did to see if anything looked abnormal, but I'm NOT 100% sure what's normal HDD performance/behavior as far as benchmarks go. It makes a little more noise than a new one, but nothing that's not typical of a 4 year old HDD. Temps are always very low, like 28-30C. So tell me if something looks whack in the benchmark. HDD regenerator came back with 0 errors across the board. Error scan with the tool I used in the SC below came back with 0 as well.

HDD.jpg
 
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Specs:

I5 2500k @ stock
R9 390 @ stock
8GBs DDR3 1600mhz
Gigabyte Z68x UD4 B3
HDD model in SC above.
Windows 7 Pro 64 bit

denis280 said:
You are aware that HDD are slower then ssd.
and what are all the system spec.this will help alot
Click to expand...

1:30 is too long of a boot time even for a mechanical HDD. I got a Windows 95 rig that boots up in almost a minute flat.
 
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thanks for the info.
for the corrupted files,sometime you need to do sfc /scannow a few time.and next time take note of the files that are corrupted.
 
When I think of the term "corrupted files", I think of files where the 1s and 0s inside of them have been altered. How could you know that this is what's causing your boot times to be slower, without having any evidence?
 
Chaotic0ne said:
Specs:

I5 2500k @ stock
R9 390 @ stock
8GBs DDR3 1600mhz
Gigabyte Z68x UD4 B3
HDD model in SC above.
Windows 7 Pro 64 bit



1:30 is too long of a boot time even for a mechanical HDD. I got a Windows 95 rig that boots up in almost a minute flat.
Click to expand...

You aren't getting a 30 second cold boot time off a mechanical hard drive and Windows 7.
 
It depends what one regards as "Windows boot time". The way I measure it is from the moment that anything pertaining to Windows appears on the screen (so in the case of Win7, the "Starting Windows" text), past the Welcome screen and to the point of the computer's disk activity settling down after loading start-up apps. When timing a customer's computer I tend to knock off about ten seconds if typing in a password is necessary).

If 1:30 was a measurement of that, that's what I regard to be within the realms of ideal for average user hardware (booting from HDD of course).

However, If I take into account (assuming that the boot time was originally measured with a stopwatch) the (approx) tripling of the start-up time length, then something has obviously changed.

PS OP - if your startup files had corrupted, Windows wouldn't be starting.

Have you checked the SMART readings for your fixed storage devices? What BSOD codes have been posted in the event log (Nirsoft's BlueScreenView will speed up your work here)? Any interesting errors or warnings in the Windows Event Viewer (under 'Windows logs' then 'System')?

chkdsk is only of particular use for diagnosis if you run a full chkdsk (chkdsk C: /r).
 
^^^^ what that guy said^^^
back up your important stuff


make yourself a boot disk for hitachi DFT, and run the advanced test against your hard drive
 
The SMART tests I ran all came back good. But the spin up time was 8.4 secs.

Thanks for the help anyway guys. I'm just gonna buy a new HDD and do a fresh windows install. I'll use my old one as a backup drive, so no loss. Backing up all my data starting from scratch will probably be easier and quicker than isolating the particular issues I'm having after going through what I've already done. I haven't done a fresh install since I first built this PC in 2011, and its probably overdue.
 
A few things:

-A HDD is going to boot Windows slower than an SSD.
-There are two things to look at when it comes to a hard drive: the file system, and the drive itself.
1. SFC is the best to use for the file system
2. Seatools for DOS is the best for the actual Drive.
3. S.M.A.R.T. is good if you want a quick snapshot of things, but in and of itself does not mean if the drive is good or bad.
4. I have had a hard drive pass all tests and still be about to croak slow, but that was only one out of dozens I have tested over the years.
-There are many other software issues that can make a drive boot slow, such as startup items, fragmentation, and malware.
-I wouldn't buy a new drive until after I had explored all avenues.
 
ketchup79 said:
-I wouldn't buy a new drive until after I had explored all avenues.
Click to expand...

I've pretty much already done all that. This HDD has never been more than 50% full at any time since I've owned it. This is a relatively clean PC as far as programs go, I don't have a ton of wasted space.

Like as soon as I login to windows (on the desktop), it takes about 4-5 seconds for any of my desktop icons to pop up, and even more time to load them all. And even after all the icons are loaded, it takes the PC another 15 seconds before I can open any programs whereas the icons used to load almost immediately (1-2secs), and once they did I could open a browser immediately with no lag, and I wasn't using an SSD..... There is definitely something seriously wrong here and its beyond my ability to troubleshoot by any other method than fresh windows install and a new HDD. I might not need a new HDD, but I might as well buy one use the current one as a backup drive. Next PC I build will have a 480gb SSD as a main drive. Bye bye slow boot times.

I haven't ran into an issue before where a PC was running slow, and I wasn't able to *fix* it with non-extreme methods.
 
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Any new software recently? I heavy AV could do something like this, since they don't load until after your user account starts to load.

I mean, you can buy a new hard drive and image your system to the new one. I just want you to know that this isn't a guarantee to fix your issue. Now, if you went back to an SSD, it probably wouldn't matter.
 
you still need to run some advanced diags on your drive, especially if you want to use it as a backup drive.

like ketchup said, i have seen drive pass all the SMART tests and still fail DFT.

does not matter if it's never been over 50% full, this is a machine with magnetic platters, they fail.
 
ketchup79 said:
Any new software recently? I heavy AV could do something like this, since they don't load until after your user account starts to load.
Click to expand...

-R9 390 + 15.7 drivers.
-Used drivebooster to update all my drivers.
-Updated my Bios from F8 to F10 *successful.


If the problem is a corrupted/bad driver then I may as well do a fresh windows install. Unless someone knows how to isolate corrupted/bad drivers efficiently with the service of some sort of software. I personally don't know how, but I know that trying to manually isolate them would be more work than a fresh install of windows unless I got lucky. I usually solved bad driver problems in the past with a system restore, but unfortunately I don't have a restore point that goes back before these issues occurred.
 
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TL;DR summary of what I've done:

Start up items - check
Update drivers - check (possible issue?)
Malware - check
Fragmentation - check
Chkdsk - check
sfc /scannow - check
HDD regenerator, 0 bad sectors - check
SMART - check
GPU drivers - check
Bios update - check
Memtest86 - check
Clean registry - check
Repair windows - fail? - Possible issue?
Windows startup repair - fail? - Possible issue?

The startup repair said there was some sorta issue found, but that it couldn't be repaired but it failed to give me any useful information as to what caused it. Of course, no SC either. If the log is somewhere in the event viewer, maybe one of you knows where?

-I'll run seagate tools tonight while I'm sleeping seeing as how it'll probably take hours.
 
mikeymikec said:
What BSOD codes have been posted in the event log (Nirsoft's BlueScreenView will speed up your work here)? Any interesting errors or warnings in the Windows Event Viewer (under 'Windows logs' then 'System')?
Click to expand...

Just typical 124 errors associated with an unstable overclocked CPU.



I got this Error earlier in the event viewer:

This same error, same error code and everything has occurred several times.

The ACP Kernel Service Driver service failed to start due to the following error:
A device attached to the system is not functioning.

- <Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event">
- <System>
<Provider Name="Service Control Manager" Guid="{555908d1-a6d7-4695-8e1e-26931d2012f4}" EventSourceName="Service Control Manager" />

<EventID Qualifiers="49152">7000</EventID>

<Version>0</Version>

<Level>2</Level>

<Task>0</Task>

<Opcode>0</Opcode>

<Keywords>0x8080000000000000</Keywords>

<TimeCreated SystemTime="2015-07-19T14:32:22.203676300Z" />

<EventRecordID>2961139</EventRecordID>

<Correlation />

<Execution ProcessID="616" ThreadID="620" />

<Channel>System</Channel>

<Computer>USER</Computer>

<Security />

</System>


- <EventData>
<Data Name="param1">ACP Kernel Service Driver</Data>

<Data Name="param2">%%31</Data>

</EventData>


</Event>
Click to expand...
 
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ninaholic37 said:
You are not alone with a driver causing slow boot times, if that's the issue:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/728-63-slow-windows-boot
Click to expand...

What do I do if its a particular USB device causing the problem other than not using it? What if its an essential device that I need? I have ran into similar situations before. For example, I can't use a PS3 pad on this machine, because it'll crash.

USB devices I got plugged in:

-Gamepad
-USB receiver for logitech G700 mouse
-USB receiver for logitech wireless keyboard
-Netgear USB wireless router.

None of these devices are newly installed, and I've been using them for at least 2 years.

But I have unplugged them and plugged them back in and maybe its possible windows derped and installed a wrong driver or something?

Is there some sort of custom USB driver that I can use that maybe has lower latency?
 
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You haven't told us what motherboard, so just guessing at this point. Looks your motherboard has combined PATA/SATA ports.. If you have a DVD/CD drive plugged into a third party controller, try to swap it to native sata port.

Edit: Ok I see you've got the Gigabyte..
If your ssd is attached thru the Marvel controller could be your problem..
 
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XavierMace said:
You aren't getting a 30 second cold boot time off a mechanical hard drive and Windows 7.
Click to expand...

No, you're wrong about that. I'm not sure wtf was going on but I just booted up my PC, and got a 31 sec cold boot. With NO SSD and a Samsung HD 103SJ 1TB 7200RPM HDD. Windows 7 64 bit. This is the boot times I'm used to getting. With an SSD it was even quicker.

Whatever problem I was experiencing appears to be solved. Thanks to anyone who offered suggestions.

Possible solution as to how this got fixed:

I unplugged my PC for several hours last night because we were getting a pretty wicked storm. That combined with everything else I did probably had something to do with it. Flushing all the power out of the motherboard can fix a lot of weird issues. If it was a problem that a full power reset fixed, then maybe it had something to do with a hardware configuration that derped out, because I've had to reset my bios to default a few times before this situation occurred from unstable overclocks. Which also caused some boot failures that required a CMOS reset before I could even boot.


fbeNYro.jpg
 
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