Explored.exe freezing continually after login.

[brex]

SOLVED: In the end I had to do a clean factory default wipe of my C: and reinstall windows 7.
I have lost a lot of stuff, but my entire D: full of important data was saved. Alt + F10 at boot.
Hope this helps someone else.

Edit: I've managed to get chkdsk working via the cmd console after selecting "fix computer" from post menu. I have found that many many many segments are unreadable and assume the drive is busted. If anyone has any ideas, or methods of correcting this short of formatting it please let me know. Otherwise I will send it in to acer, thankfully it is still under warranty!



I own an aspire timelineX 4820tg with 4th ram and windows 7.
I use avg antivirus, and have had zero problems on it since I got it.
It has a switchable graphics card mode to save battery power.

That out of the way here is my problem.
Windows boots up okay, offers a dskchk. Okay fine I'll run it.
It stops around 5% sometimes 1% and I'm forced to hard reset it.

Next round I skip the check and load windows normally.
I log in with my password, and then after a while the start bar comes up and the freezing starts. I can move my mouse around, but clicking on anything will result in nothing for ages. Sometimes the action goes through but most apps or explored windows immediately go "not responding".

I have a short window to open the task manager and do some stuff but after a while even this ends up with huge delays. I presume this is a corrupt file on my C: but without chkdsk working I don't know what to do. The CPU spikes every 20-30 seconds and during the freezes even the graphs in the task manager stop.

I click defrag and nothing comes up at all.
I click check for errors and am forced to reschedule till next boot where dskchk hangs again as mentioned above.

I have even resorted to an attempted reset windows 7 to defaults from post. This would probably work but I do not have enough free space on the drive to complete the windows repair.

I have managed to get into msconfig and turn it to diagnostic mode. This makes no difference.

I have made regular restore points but they have amazingly disappeared, all but my original factory default one that I have no interest in.

Safe mode fails at a file called avgidseh.sys and hangs, this I found was related to avg. So I uninstalled it over a long halting freezing time, but further attempt to get to safe mode still stop at the same file?

Cn anyone offer some suggestions? I return to work in three days and desperately need my laptop. It didn't come with a windows 7 disc so I am kinda stuck.

Thank you for reading!

 

[richc46]

Welcome
Very sorry that you are having problem. Step one is to see if the hard drive is actually the problem
Test Hard Drive HD Diagnostic or this test www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=287
The first thing to do is to back up your stuff just in case
If this is negative, I think that we can resolve your problems.

 

[brex]

Rich! Thanks for your reply!
After chkdsk finished, it reported many many unreadable segments and also reported many problems solved.
I'm not sure what happened exactly, but after rebooting windows automatically dumped me into the startup repair.
That will scan and at first it attempted to do "disk repairs" that ran for about 3 hours then suddenly rebooted.
The second time it ran it just sat there looking for errors and never goes anywhere.

Safe mode is now not an option from f8 boot menu.
What I am doing at the moment I'd letting the acer windows recovery "repair" the windows 7 installation.
I would will take your advise and scan the drive if this works, but otherwise I guess I'll be stuck backing stuff up from a Linux thumb drive os :-(

 

[richc46]

If the hard drive has failed or almost failing, might be too late to back up.

 

[brex]

Wow. Okay how is this for strange.
After a recovery of windows 7 failed, I decided my last and only option was to attempt a factory default wipe.
This is the first thing acer's support line would tell me to do anyway so I gave it a go.
Well this time windows 7 installed okay, no errors.
Even stranger, after a chkdsk scan, there was not a single unreadable segment or any errors.
I defraged the drive (only 1% fragmented) and ran another chkdsk to be sure.
Again no errors...?!?

I will continue on with this clean install for a while after backing up all my stuff.
If it keeps lucky me, if not, time to send it in.

THANKS RICHc!