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

[peatcoal]

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

 

[peatcoal]

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.

 

[PlatypusKnight]

@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?

 

[peatcoal]

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

 

[PlatypusKnight]

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.

 

[peatcoal]

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.

 

[ThrashZone]

Hi,
See if this helps,
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itproperf/thread/d47aece7-5e12-46ec-8d3e-e8671730a7ce

 

[peatcoal]

Hi,
See if this helps,
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itproperf/thread/d47aece7-5e12-46ec-8d3e-e8671730a7ce

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.

 

[PlatypusKnight]

@peatcoal

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

 

[RobMagP]

Flash the BIOS.

 

[peatcoal]

@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

 

[PlatypusKnight]

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]

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.

 

[peatcoal]

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

 

[PlatypusKnight]

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.

You're expert enough to have figured that out. Not too shabby. That is a likely cause.

We'll see if we can't get something definitive when chkdsk is done with your drive.

 

[peatcoal]

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.

 

[PlatypusKnight]

@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.

 

[peatcoal]

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.

 

[peatcoal]

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....

 

[PlatypusKnight]

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.

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?