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Windows hangs up / won't start due to constant HDD thrashing
A few days ago I awoke my Toshiba laptop in the morning, only to find it hanging up with continuous HDD activity. After a while I did a hard shutdown and tried to restart, but the HDD activity continued, and after an hour of trying, it was barely past the start screen - zero chance of any useful activity.
It performs normally in command prompt, and I can barely get it booted in safe mode (HDD thrash eventually stops until I ask it to do anything). Task manager doesn't show any unusual processes or services, but the resource monitor does show the HDD activity. Chkdsk (thru command prompt) on the X and D partitions came out fine, but on the C drive it doesn't even get to 1% and slows to about 1 file/minute. I attempted a Start Repair, but it said nothing was wrong. Tried a System Restore, but for some reason no restore points could be found.
The HDD seems to be performing OK (I'm using robocopy/cmd prompt to copy all I can to an external HDD), with only the occasional I/O error. It's possible I caught a virus, although I'm generally cautious (Ad-Aware antivirus, all updates ASAP, regular scans with this and Malwarebytes).
I'd really, really like to find a way out of this without a complete reformat. I've tried stopping everything I could in Safe Mode, but to no avail. Also tried to uninstall my AV software (and anything else that seemed to be running at startup), but was denied there as well. Anyone got any ideas?