New
#11
Thank you for getting back to us with your results,
It's certainly very interesting (Marie asked a very good question) how the PC seems to behave normally in safe mode. Could it be some malicious or dodgy software, just glitching and using your HDD when in "normal mode"?
Another thing you could try, is have a look in the Resource Monitor in the "Disk" tab to see which process is reading/writing to the hard drive so intensly. To open resource monitor, hold down the windows key on your keyboard and press "R" (win+r) in the "Run" dialogue box that appears, type in "resmon" and press enter.
As for the hard drive, yes it seems that it has a single bad sector, and another single bad sector waiting to be replaced. Some drives are fine with a few bad sectors that have been reallocated (marked as bad, and spare sectors put in place of them) others are only going to get worse. We can't know what will happen. I have recently had an external 750GB drive with over 200 bad sectors, and the only two files I wasn't able to recover were 2 photos, so I wouldn't worry about how much damage a single sector did (yes, single, because the other one has been reallocated and is no longer a problem)
However, after formatting and running chkdsk on the hard drive I mentioned, the bad sectors grew from 200 to 4000.
So, have you made a backup image with macrium, of your hard drive? which mode did you use? Can someone else confirm that OP backed up his personal files? I'm not familiar with Macrium. The fact that it took so long, would hint at the hard drive dying, and so does the poor performance, and it not wanting to load your "Downloads"