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I encountered a problem randomly that most likely started last night (I'll explain why).

I was using my computer as usual; I downloaded a series of a television show and updated an online game. I shut off my computer before I went to sleep for the night. Next morning, I booted up my computer and I received the infamous frozen "Starting Windows" screen for nearly 30 minutes. Then I rebooted the computer to the BIOS menu and set the mode from LEGACY to UEFI just for the heck of it. I'm not sure if this fixed it, but it managed to get out off "Starting Windows" after a bit and led me into disk check for my secondary drive for et cetera programs, movies, and games.

After logging into Windows 7, I felt like watching a TV show on my hard drive and opened it up in MPC-HC. It proceeded to stutter constantly and wouldn't play at all after a few seconds in. This isn't a MPC-HC problem because I tried it in VLC and MPV and also encountered similar problems. It happened to nearly all my TV shows. Also, games like osu! crash after you get to the song menu, so the problem must be universal for most media files on my TB hard drive.

I tried system restoring to the day before it began, but I also encountered the "Starting Windows" error. I chose the same procedures as earlier, except I changed UEFI to LEGACY in my BIOS menu. I still have the same problem. I'm not sure how I should tackle this as it could be caused by practically anything.

I'm not a expert at computer knowledge, so I would be very grateful of your input. Thank you.

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  • Welcome to Super User. Have you ran virus and malware scans to ensure the computer is clean?
    – CharlieRB
    Commented Jun 25, 2015 at 17:59
  • Sounds like you have massive file corruption cause by bad sectors on the storage device. At this point the simplest and guarantee method for sucess load your backups onto a new HDD.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Jun 25, 2015 at 18:03

2 Answers 2

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Bad Sectors on Disk

As the Windows has already attempted to rectify the situation with a Check Disk to some partial success I would assumed from the information given that one or more of your HDD's is failing.

Test for Bad Sectors

There are many software suites out there dedicated to checking the integrity of Hard Disk Drives.

I personally use HDD Regenerator but this software is not free, unfortunately I do not know of any free alternatives other than the built in Check Disk function of Windows.

Check Disk

You can open CMD prompt

Run the following command:

chkdsk C: -r

This will find and repair bad sectors by marking them out of use to ensure that the computer does not attempt to store anything on the bad parts of the drive.

You can check all of the partitions and drives on your computer by replacing the C with the drive letter to be checked.

Further Information

If you drive is drying which is very likely in my opinion then you need to replace it sooner than later and backup your stuff immediately.

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  • Hey, thanks everyone. I ran tests for viruses, ran CrystalDiskInfo and chkdsk for information for bad sectors, and I think it may be my OS Drive "C:". However, I ran into no bad sectors in chkdsk, but possibly in CrystalDiskInfo. I'm not sure what most of the values mean in the program. i.imgur.com/FZojSxV.png
    – One Jelly Belly
    Commented Jun 25, 2015 at 20:00
  • I would say the drive is in the process of dying. They can stay like that for years but ultimately there is a much higher risk of further damage to the drive and data loss in the immediate future. I personally would replace the drive.
    – Craig Lowe
    Commented Jun 25, 2015 at 20:03
  • Thank you Craig Lowe. I'll have to back up my data and perhaps buy a new HDD.
    – One Jelly Belly
    Commented Jun 25, 2015 at 20:14
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In case you do have a classical hard disk (no SSD) built in that may be a sign of a dying disk. If there are read errors on the disk the software / operating system tries to read over and over again several times until it ultimately fails after several attempts (or succeeds after a few attempts) - and that slows down everything.

First make sure that you have a backup of all your (important) data on the device. Afterwards I would recommend to check hard disk health (e.g. using CrystalDiskInfo for S.M.A.R.T. diagnostic values and / or with the tool provided by the manufacturer of your harddisk, which commonly provides a low level full disk scan). S.M.A.R.T. values will probably already tell you whether the disk is really the source of the error or not.

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