Laptop takes 10 minutes to log in: black screen with cursor

@RobMagP I don't understand

@PlatypusKnight and anyone, It's been 2 days and CHKDSK is on stage 3, 51% complete. It's not hanging, and if it keeps going at the current rate I think it'll take 72-ish hours more - it's progressing by one file SID per 2 seconds.



At this point I'm resigned to buying a new drive (or trying to get a new one under warranty if possible), but

What should I do? Should I let it finish or am I better off stopping it, mounting my drive and backing up the files on it ASAP? There's no incredibly vital files on it that aren't backed up, but it would be nice to not lose its contents

At this point, I wouldn't stop it unless you absolutely HAD to have the files now.

You already waited two days. What's another 72 hours?

I have never seen chkdsk take this long. It will be interesting to see what the results are.

Remind me how big this drive is again.

PlatypusKnight said:

Wait a second. . . how did you get that screenshot?

Is this not your OS drive?

Edit: Nevermind. I reread the thread. This is not your OS drive.

Yep, it's not my OS drive, just has some of my files on it. I'm thinking it could still have caused the slow login though if it was corrupted and explorer or something else was trying to access it during the login for whatever reason. I'm no expert though.

Think you're right that I may as well leave it. It's been stuck like this now for a few hours (looks like it might have finished?) but I'll see if anything happens overnight:



Thanks for all your input so far

So the chkdsk finally finished. Here's the final results



I don't have time this morning to remove the drive and reboot etc, so I'll try this evening. I've started a WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostics "quick test" running on the drive, but it doesn't seem that quick, so I'll see what the results of that are later.

Edit: the quick test failed

Test Error Code: 06-Quick Test on drive 2 did not complete! Status code = 07 (Failed read test element), Failure Checkpoint = 97 (Unknown Test) SMART self-test did not complete on drive 2!

Looks like it's under warranty thankfully.

@peatcoal Looks like there's something wrong with this drive. I would return it.

Particularly if it's failing Data Lifeguard Diagnostics.

Rerun the test and if it fails again save a copy of the results somewhere.

So I removed the failing hard drive from my laptop and lo and behold, the login was instantaneous. Mystery solved!

I'm currently trying to recover my files from the drive. Then, I'll be RMAing it back to WD.

I've had the hard drive for almost 4 years now, and it's worked great. About a month ago, I bought my SSD, and moved the hard drive into a cheap caddy for the DVD slot of my laptop. I'm wondering if it's possible if this was related to the hard drive failure? I don't want to destroy another drive by using a dodgy caddy. At the same time, it's worked great up to now. What do you think?

I'll be RMAing the drive as soon as I've got my files off it.

Looks like recovering the files off the drive might be a lost cause. Trying to copy using Windows explorer was incredibly slow. I read up a bit and found out that cloning the drive with ddrescue before using file recovery software on the new drive, is the best option.



At this rate it's going to take 26 weeks to finish cloning my 750GB drive....

peatcoal said:

So I removed the failing hard drive from my laptop and lo and behold, the login was instantaneous. Mystery solved!
I'm currently trying to recover my files from the drive. Then, I'll be RMAing it back to WD.

Excellent. Well not excellent, but we finally got one situation solved. Sorry about the drive, but this is how things go. Hopefully they don't give you any crap about the warranty.

peatcoal said:

I've had the hard drive for almost 4 years now, and it's worked great. About a month ago, I bought my SSD, and moved the hard drive into a cheap caddy for the DVD slot of my laptop. I'm wondering if it's possible if this was related to the hard drive failure? I don't want to destroy another drive by using a dodgy caddy. At the same time, it's worked great up to now. What do you think?

I don't know. But if you don't trust the caddy you don't trust it. What's wrong with using an external hd?