PC question

jdgm

A Windows10 issue; had big problem at start-up today, very unexpected;  OS not loading.  Automatic repair started then screen went completely blank, not even blue!

So far I've had 12 hours faffing about.

What seemed to have happened is that Win10 changed the name of one of the drives to 'local disk' - I have no idea why or how - and that was probably causing the problem...I think.  Can anybody tell me if that was cause or an effect?

When it finally loaded (after some shut downs and reboots) I tried troubleshooters, various scans; some ran, some didn't.

Everything was very slow and I couldn't get Disk Management to come up.

I shut down, disconnected the offending drive's SATA lead from the motherboard and rebooted.

It took awhile but eventually told me it was scanning and repairing system reserved drive (F).

I discovered I'd disconnected the wrong lead but it didn't matter as now the drive was showing the correct name. Shut down, reconnected lead, rebooted and it worked ok again.

So I decided to restart. Took a long time, once again it scanned and repaired system reserved drive (F), and once again it has renamed my H drive to local disk, thus making it inaccessible. And I can't get the Disk Management up either, once again.

WTF?  I'm going to shut down and reboot again next.

Please note I am no expert and when I tried to use the SFC command it told me I had to run it as an administrator which I don't know how to do.  Probably lucky for me I couldn't do that then.

Damn thing has a mind of its own.  How do I make myself the administrator of my own bloody PC? Shouting at it didn't work!!

Many thanks in advance for any help.

Snags

To run sfc as an admin launch an elevated prompt (Win+X and choose either Command Prompt (Admin) or Powershell (Admin) depending on Win 10 version /choices you may have made).

I think the local disk is likely to be a red herring. It might even have been a feature update going on slowly, but diagnosing the cause without digging through event logs etc and having much more info is going to be ... amusing.

jdgm

Thanks I've edited my post as it's happened again - see above. Red herring or not I can't access the drive with that name. It takes ages to shut down - I get a message TrusteerNotificationAreaMSGbox preventing shutdown and don't know what it means, plus Not Responding in my browser while writing this. And Task Manager shows Disk 2 (the one that got renamed but has come up with the right title now as I disconnected the other HD again!!!!) running at 100% all the time. I had that problem before and thought it was Intel Queencreek. Could be faulty SATA socket(s) on the motherboard. Can you change a motherboard and re-mount the processor on the new one?

I hate this stuff.

...And restarted again, Disk 2 now not active all the time like it was.  Think I'll get a USB caddy or something.

Shrews

Anything like this? :

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-security/chinese-application-preventing-shutdown/04e95ce0-0c1b-4028-8400-dadcdceac288?auth=1

I googled 'TrusteerNotificationAreaMSGbox'

Snags

Yes, you can do a motherboard swap, although you'll need to be careful removing the heatsink from the CPU, and have appropriate cleaning stuff and replacement heatsink paste for reassembly.  Also, you ought to take appropriate anti-static measures etc. etc. - if the SATA ports on the mobo really are faulty (incredibly rare in my experience, unless actively damaged or the mobo is a piece of junk) then as you're not wildly confident at this, you might be better just getting a SATA controller to plug in.

Trusteer is a right PITA but is probably not the underlying problem here.

Personally, given the unknown starting position, your own stated lack of knowledge, the reasonable assumption that there's been a fair bit of random poking going on based on random Googling, and the fact that the system appears to be Very Upset Indeed I would suggest one or two courses of action:

- take it to someone you know and trust who knows about this stuff, and get them to look at it (possibly with you, as a learning exercise if you're interested in knowing more for the future)
- start again from scratch on a clean system, and, as you suggest, use a USB caddy to recover any data that you haven't got backed up (although obviously you will have everything you care about backed up )

That's not meant to sound harsh, just trying to avoid giving advice that could lead to an even bigger FUBAR than you've got right now

jdgm

Many thanks for all the answers.

I disconnected one of the HDs (not the offending one!) and now it's happy and working as fast as ever. I didn't get the Trusteer message again.

I have had the 'HD working at 100% all the time' thing before - it happened with Win8 too. I think this is a big part of the problem. There are several possibilities why, including; Explorer isn't closing, or that a file somewhere has been moved or renamed somehow and the system is searching for it.

I stopped it previously by not using Quick Access/getting rid of Intel Queencreek/plugging the offending HD into another SATA port.

It's started again after just over a year of trouble-free computing, and it might be that Windows has created too much data - as you know, it copies files and indexes them all the time....so now I doubt if it is the MOBO (thanks for acronym!).

My workaround solution has been to order one of these - an HD docking station/USB caddy, so I will run 2 HDs via that:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00LN0GX4I/ref=pe_3187911_185740111_TE_item

And a 32GB USB memory stick so I can creat a backup drive to boot from if necessary in future.

The last PC repairman I used was very good at hardware, but that was his solution to almost anything - new hardware. He did a lot of 'random poking...based on random Googling' - I can do that if necessary but I'd rather not.

Thanks again folks.

Snags

To find out what's hitting the disk you can use the SysInternals tools.  However, to get a basic idea from built-in stuff, use Resource Monitor, switch to the Disk tab and sort by Write (writes are more intensive than reads).  Also expand the Storage pane to see how big the queue is.

On Disk Activity it's the "Highest Active Time" that matters, more so than the basic i/o.  If you're at 100% Highest Active Time and you have a queue that's regularly significantly over 1, then the disk is a bottleneck.

Sorting by write activity will tend to show you which process(es) are the culprit.  Ticking the box by the process will then filter the activity down to just the ticked items.  You then sort that by Write activity too and see what file(s) are being hit, and that can give you a big clue as to whether it's just normal Windows "stuff" or something that you can deal with more directly.

guitartango

@jdgm, @Snags ;Not sure if this the same thing but wasn't there a problem with the latest Windows 10 update? Have you tried going back to the last known config ? 

Phil_aka_Pip

so not a problem with

• Political Correctness
• Prostate Cancer
• Police Constables

?

jdgm

Phil_aka_Pip said:

so not a problem with

• Political Correctness
• Prostate Cancer
• Police Constables

?

Funnily enough I had a scan and blood tests for prostate recently. 

There are no Police Constables these days are there?

And yes, I was wondering about the recent update too......

Shrews

The reason they changed it from Constables was that people would insult them by changing the O to a U.

Now they're insulted by using the much milder Orrificers, I mean Officers.

There's no 'punk' in the world anymore. 

Axe_meister

Check your BIOS. I've found that sometimes after a windows update or a soft restart, my Bios selects a non bootable drive as a boot drive (even though I've taken them out of the Boot priority list, they just keep coming back for some reason)