I have a Dell Vostro 2420 Laptop that has abruptly developed this weird problem: It will boot up, allow me to login and then hang / freeze.
Details:
- It successfully draws the desktop and starts some of the startup processes etc. So HDD seems ok
- More than a total hang it seems to have gotten abbysmaly slow. e.g. After 2-3 mins sometimes a double click will result into action
- The internal HDD light seems constantly on.
Any tips on debugging?
What I've established so far:
- Safe Mode does not help. That hangs too.
- Safe Mode with Command Line first seems to hang but left to itself for 10-15 mins falls successfully into the command line. The command line works fine. I can see all my files and I even copied critical data out to an external HDD. HDD Light does not stay constantly on in this command line mode.
- Ran Windows sfc (system file checker) successfully but it reported no integrity problems
- I installed a Fedora Live CD to a USB stick and changed the boot order to boot into Fedora Live. Works like a charm (but of course, that isn't using the HDD)
- BIOS shows my internal HDD as "ST500LM012". That sounds like a Seagate disk to me so I installed the "Seatools DOS" program to a bootable CD and tried booting that. Boots but Seatools reports no drive that it can debug.
- Had another pre-existing user account on this machine. Tried logging in via that. Same hang / freeze problem.
Now I'm stumped. What sort of problem does this look like? Any ideas?
What seem to be my options?
Ideally, I'd like to fix whatever specific is causing these problems because I've a ton of work programs installed on this Laptop and reinstalling all of those will be a PITA. Rolling back to a stable OS state from (say) a week ago would also do.
Suggestions?