vista taking 20 - 30 mins to boot, please advise

[arsenalbates]

hi all, after my acer laptop crashed yesturday and i had to hard power it down it has been so slugish, it takes about 20 - 30 mins to boot and after doing a hard disk scan it was apparent that some blocks were taking a matter of seconds to read.

im going to try chkdsk but i cant understand this problem ?

update : disk is making a scratchy sound every half a second, not continuous, safe mode is super slow also. scratch pause for about 1/4 of a second then scratch and so on ???.

im thinking hard drive failure ?

just poped it into a caddy via usb to my main machine and its is very hot, im trying to get some of the data from it now but it is acting very slow and still scratching

 

[FlightSimBoy]

Get all of your data off of the hard drive as quickly as possible, it sounds like you don't have much time left. That's a definite hard drive failure scenario.

 

[BK_123]

Have you got very important things on there?

 

[computersnz]

Bugger dowsnt sound very good ...SMART should pick up a bad drive on boot interesting it hasn't... the 1 thing i can recommend is boot of a linux boot disk , an ubuntu install disk has an option to try and runs from ram you could back off data from there , and also that would rule out any software issues,,,, sounds hardware to me though . Good Luck

 

[arsenalbates]

Thanks for the replies guys, just an update to say that it was the hard drive and after about 1 hour of waiting for it to finally boot i was able to get access to my data and transfer it to a USB

Reinstalling Windows right now, all should be good.

Thanks again.

 

[Indigo]

Reinstalling Windows right now, all should be good.

I really hope you're kidding. The drive itself is BAD. STOP using it. You will NOT get the drive to behave for much longer, if at all.

If you mean with a new drive, then carry on.

 

[arsenalbates]

If you mean with a new drive, then carry on.

yeh on a new drive lol