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

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  1. Posts : 12
    Windows 7 Home Premium
       #1

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


    Hi,

    Today my Sony Vaio VPCEB2C5E laptop with Windows 7 Home Premium started showing a black screen for up to 10-15 minutes every time I log in. This happens in safe mode too. The boot up until the login screen is fine - takes about 15 seconds as I'm using a new SSD. I find that I can open the task manager. Sometimes explorer won't close in the Task Manager, no matter what I do, but after 10 minutes everything works fine. Other times I can kill the explorer process and re-open it with run and then things are back to normal. Whatever happens, once my taskbar eventually loads, everything else seems to be running fine.

    When I last rebooted my laptop a few days ago the laptop rebooted fine. The only thing which I recall changing in the last few days is sharing a couple of folders on my home network, and a Razer mouse driver updates.


    I've been doing quite a lot of googling around the issue and trying out various solutions.

    Things I've tried so far:
    Performing a "clean boot" (disabling everything except microsoft services using msconfig)
    sfc /scannow
    chkdsk c: /f
    chkdsk c: /r
    Removing all network drives

    I had a look in Event Manager to see if I could see anything obvious, and it said that the Panda Antivirus Protection service was taking a very long time to start, so I uninstalled Panda and replaced it with Avast. This had no effect.

    I also just did a system restore to a point several days before the issue emerged. The problem is still there.

    None of these have made any difference to the issue. At this point, with the system restore not working, I'm wondering if it could be hardware related?

    If anyone has any suggestions I'm all ears. Thanks
      My Computer


  2. Posts : 12
    Windows 7 Home Premium
    Thread Starter
       #2

    Oh, another thing I tried but forgot to mention: I scanned the laptop with Panda, Avast and Malwarebytes and they all said it was clean.
      My Computer


  3. Posts : 115
    Dual Boot Win 8.1 x64; Win 7 SP1 x64
       #3

    @peatcoal Welcome to 7 Forums.

    This is the second thread I've seen on here today with the same issue.

    New malware strain? I'll be keeping an eye on this. Interesting.

    That said. . .
    Do you have any of the following programs installed:

    Fences,
    DAEMON Tools,
    VistaSwitcher,
    TeraCopy?
      My Computer


  4. Posts : 12
    Windows 7 Home Premium
    Thread Starter
       #4

    Hi @platypusknight :)

    Yes, I've had TeraCopy installed for about a month. It's still installed after restoring to the restore point where everything used to be working fine. Is TeraCopy known to cause problems?

    Edit: forgot to mention, another thing I noticed yesterday after booting up for the umpteenth time was that my HDD (750GB, the second drive, it doesn't have my OS on it but it has my Music, Videos, Pictures and Google drive folder) needed disk checking - I was getting bad block and corrupted file system messages in the event viewer. I'm running chkdsk /f on it and it's been 15 hours so far, and only 8 percent complete. At the moment it's saying "File Record segment 9xxxxx of 1181696 is unreadable".

    I'm wondering A. if I should stop this and start doing a chkdsk /r

    B. whether this is the cause of my slow login problems, or if it was caused by me holding down the power button a couple of times while my laptop was taking forever to start up

    Cheers
      My Computer


  5. Posts : 115
    Dual Boot Win 8.1 x64; Win 7 SP1 x64
       #5

    peatcoal said:
    Hi @platypusknight :)

    Yes, I've had TeraCopy installed for about a month. It's still installed after restoring to the restore point where everything used to be working fine. Is TeraCopy known to cause problems?

    Edit: forgot to mention, another thing I noticed yesterday after booting up for the umpteenth time was that my HDD (750GB, the second drive, it doesn't have my OS on it but it has my Music, Videos, Pictures and Google drive folder) needed disk checking - I was getting bad block and corrupted file system messages in the event viewer. I'm running chkdsk /f on it and it's been 15 hours so far, and only 8 percent complete. At the moment it's saying "File Record segment 9xxxxx of 1181696 is unreadable".

    I'm wondering A. if I should stop this and start doing a chkdsk /r

    B. whether this is the cause of my slow login problems, or if it was caused by me holding down the power button a couple of times while my laptop was taking forever to start up

    Cheers
    For some reason @peatcoal, I suspect that you have malware.

    I don't have anything to back up that suspicion but. . .

    Can you give me an update on chkdsk so I know what my next move is.
      My Computer


  6. Posts : 12
    Windows 7 Home Premium
    Thread Starter
       #6

    PlatypusKnight said:
    peatcoal said:
    Hi @platypusknight :)

    Yes, I've had TeraCopy installed for about a month. It's still installed after restoring to the restore point where everything used to be working fine. Is TeraCopy known to cause problems?

    Edit: forgot to mention, another thing I noticed yesterday after booting up for the umpteenth time was that my HDD (750GB, the second drive, it doesn't have my OS on it but it has my Music, Videos, Pictures and Google drive folder) needed disk checking - I was getting bad block and corrupted file system messages in the event viewer. I'm running chkdsk /f on it and it's been 15 hours so far, and only 8 percent complete. At the moment it's saying "File Record segment 9xxxxx of 1181696 is unreadable".

    I'm wondering A. if I should stop this and start doing a chkdsk /r

    B. whether this is the cause of my slow login problems, or if it was caused by me holding down the power button a couple of times while my laptop was taking forever to start up

    Cheers
    For some reason @peatcoal, I suspect that you have malware.

    I don't have anything to back up that suspicion but. . .

    Can you give me an update on chkdsk so I know what my next move is.
    Current state of the chkdsk after about 22 hours is "10 percent complete". Not sure what to do next. I read that lots of bad sectors means the hard drive is dead and should be backed up ASAP and then replaced. Once the chkdsk finishes I'll let you know the results, then try taking out the hard drive and rebooting and seeing if that sorts the original issue.
      My Computer


  7. Posts : 20,583
    Win-7-Pro64bit 7-H-Prem-64bit
       #7
      My Computer


  8. Posts : 12
    Windows 7 Home Premium
    Thread Starter
       #8

    Hi, thanks for the link.

    I already tried all of those suggestions. I don't have a DVD/bluray drive as I put a HDD caddy in the slot. All the other suggestions, including a system restore, made no difference.

    Regarding my chkdsk of my 2nd drive, it's up to 38% after 24 hours. It's correcting errors in indexes, and deleting index entries atm.
      My Computer


  9. Posts : 115
    Dual Boot Win 8.1 x64; Win 7 SP1 x64
       #9

    @peatcoal

    I'll keep checking back. I have no experience with chkdsk taking this long but I'll wait it out and see.
      My Computer


  10. Posts : 1
    WIN8
       #10

    Flash the BIOS.
      My Computer


 
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