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Vista unresponsive even with format

Ghiedo27

Ghiedo27

Senior member
I'm trying to help my dad out with his computer. He has been having slow boots / shutdowns and having to restart several times before being able to get anything done for probably a week now. I went over and ran windows defender which found a trojan. It 'removed' it and I restarted the computer which promptly failed to boot at all.

I decided that I may as well just reformat. Since I couldn't get into windows to do a clean install (upgrade version) I grabbed my trusty win xp pro disc to do a format and basic install- just enough to have a version of windows I could boot into in order to get his version of vista going again. Unfortunately, the first time I tried to install vista it failed during the unpacking. The second attempt was successful- sort of.

Right now it will boot into windows and will connect to the internet but it is extremely unresponsive and behaving strangely. Keystrokes and mouse clicks have a delayed effect (think up to a minute) as well as windows activation not coming up in the taskbar and windows update not prompting for a restart (just hanging at a particular percentage). The computer will also lock up and require a hard shutdown. Installing a set of windows updates took 3 hours today, for example.

I'm thinking either the virus affected the HDD boot sector / bios or there's a hardware malfunction either caused by the virus or coincidental. Memtest 86 and vista mem checker both say the memory is fine and a quick HD tach scan showed the hard drive is getting 60MBps average throughput with a 110Mbps peak. It's an older 250GB drive, so I'm not too surprised by those numbers.

I should mention that the new install didn't start slowing down until I installed 11.5(?) catalyst control center, which has been prompting me that it requires .net 3.5. I've been holding out hope that as I get windows up to date and install it that the system will become usable, but that seems like a silly hope at this point.

edit: probably solved as bad HDD.
 
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I doubt this is a virus issue. This is a hardware issue. My guess would be a dying hard drive, followed by overheating.
 
I agree when a PC starts slowing down that badly it is probably a failing hard disk. If you were to do a chkdsk you would probably see it take hours to complete.
 
Thanks for the responses, guys.

Running the full check disk took something like 45m. It found an error in the pagefile.sys and reported 4kb in bad sectors. Temperatures are all fine to the touch and HwMonitor reports good temps across the board.

The memory (1.8v 2GB mushkin kit) is getting 1.92v, oddly. All other voltages seem fine at idle and it's set to auto in bios (which detects the correct SPD settings). I'm going to manually set 1.8v in bios and see if it's prime95 stable next.

Whatever smokes first gets replaced! :biggrin:
 
Ghiedo, when you formatted the disk, did you do a full format or a fast format? A full format will map out all the bad sectors, a fast format wont. If you did a full format, then it is very likely that your HD is failing now (in fact, I suspect that right now even if you did do a full format).

Your HD may die completely at any moment.
 
I did pick a full format with the XP pro disc plus whatever the vista basic installer did before loading (which didn't seem to be anything at all). I hope you're right about the hard drive. Is there something I can do to accelerate it's demise if it is the culprit or should I just swap in a replacement and see how things go?

Update: Manually setting the voltage on the ram brought that in line. The system ran prime95 for about an hour with no errors, so I feel a bit better about the cpu, MB, ram, and power supply (rock solid voltages). In the spirit that more information is better than less I'll add that the system is a pentium D 935 in a Gigabyte ep45-ud3p with a 2gb mushkin kit powered by an Antec 650w truepower trio. A few months ago I added a Sapphire 5670, other than that everything has been running on light load for probably 2 years or so.

The computer is still slow to respond but for some reason it's a bit snappier now- except for when it just totally locks up, lol. I'm hoping it's just the recent chkdsk covering up the incoming catastrophic failure of the hard drive.
 
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I would download and run the HD utility from the manufacturers site.
You will get more info running that than chkdsk.
 
pcgeek11 said:
If it is showing bad sectors you need to get a new hard disk. It will only get worse.
Click to expand...

Agreed. A full format puts borders around bad sectors. For new ones to show up now means that your hard drive is on its way out. I can't predict how long it will take (nobody can) but I can tell you that it will happen, until it does, it will be like playing russian roulette. All the sudden, random files and programs will just stop working.
 
Ghiedo27 said:
I'll add that the system is a pentium D 935 in a Gigabyte ep45-ud3p with a 2gb mushkin kit powered by an Antec 650w truepower trio. A few months ago I added a Sapphire 5670, other than that everything has been running on light load for probably 2 years or so.
Click to expand...
Such a nice rig, except for that Pentium D! Get a E5200 (E5700?) in there, and clock it to the moon.
 
It's funny that you should mention the upgrades, because I was considering under clocking the processor by half to see if he'd notice. :sneaky:

On a more serious note it has finally updated up through service pack 1 and has progressively become more responsive (still not good). I downloaded Western Digital's tool and the quick scan passed just fine. The thorough test is about half way done at this point, so fingers crossed for massive smoke and such.

I've been trying to rationalize how the hard drive could be going bad without some kind of noise or missing files. The only thing that comes to mind is that it's either the non moving parts or the controller on the motherboard. Am I completely off base with this, or should I try it in another sata port using the other controller? At the moment it's using the gigabyte chip. Maybe I'll have better luck with the regular connectors?
 
Ghiedo27 said:
It's funny that you should mention the upgrades, because I was considering under clocking the processor by half to see if he'd notice. :sneaky:

On a more serious note it has finally updated up through service pack 1 and has progressively become more responsive (still not good). I downloaded Western Digital's tool and the quick scan passed just fine. The thorough test is about half way done at this point, so fingers crossed for massive smoke and such.

I've been trying to rationalize how the hard drive could be going bad without some kind of noise or missing files. The only thing that comes to mind is that it's either the non moving parts or the controller on the motherboard. Am I completely off base with this, or should I try it in another sata port using the other controller? At the moment it's using the gigabyte chip. Maybe I'll have better luck with the regular connectors?
Click to expand...

It's found bad sectors... this isn't a coincidence. They don't just turn up on healthy drives; the hard drive is failing. Get a new one for $40 and quit wasting your time.
 
It's found bad sectors... this isn't a coincidence. They don't just turn up on healthy drives; the hard drive is failing. Get a new one for $40 and quit wasting your time.
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Eh, where's the fun of playing with technology if you don't play with the technology? Things get much more interesting when they're not working properly. I'm sorry if you feel like I'm derailing your computer help browsing forum experience with a computer help question under such a format. :colbert:

edit: Now that I've worked up a soapbox here let me add that the hard drive failed the Henry David test and is on the way out. Thanks for helping out. I probably would have been fretting on about the virus still otherwise. :thumbsup:

That said, I'd still love to hear what people think about the nature of the failure. I just like to go one step further into things than I have to when I can.
 
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Ghiedo27 said:
Eh, where's the fun of playing with technology if you don't play with the technology? Things get much more interesting when they're not working properly. I'm sorry if you feel like I'm derailing your computer help browsing forum experience with a computer help question under such a format. :colbert:

edit: Now that I've worked up a soapbox here let me add that the hard drive failed the Henry David test and is on the way out. Thanks for helping out. I probably would have been fretting on about the virus still otherwise. :thumbsup:

That said, I'd still love to hear what people think about the nature of the failure. I just like to go one step further into things than I have to when I can.
Click to expand...

It is a pretty rare thing for a hard drive to fail because of a software issue. Hard drives primarily fail because they are primarily mechanical devices. There is 100 things that could be going on. The coating on the disk may be degrading for some reason or another, there may be a loose screw around the scanning arm, You may have placed your computer in the part of the house that receives an inordinate amount of Alpha radiation to which this hard drive is highly susceptible due to manufacturing flaws.

There are really countless ways any individual computer component can go bad, and most of them are ones that have no solution besides "get a new one".
 
Ghiedo27 said:
Eh, where's the fun of playing with technology if you don't play with the technology? Things get much more interesting when they're not working properly. I'm sorry if you feel like I'm derailing your computer help browsing forum experience with a computer help question under such a format. :colbert:

edit: Now that I've worked up a soapbox here let me add that the hard drive failed the Henry David test and is on the way out. Thanks for helping out. I probably would have been fretting on about the virus still otherwise. :thumbsup:

That said, I'd still love to hear what people think about the nature of the failure. I just like to go one step further into things than I have to when I can.
Click to expand...

It could be as simple as an improper shut down which caused the head touch the platter and damaged the surface. This small piece of platter coating flying around inside continues to damage the platter randomly... A particle of smoke can crash a head as it flies so close to the platter.
 
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