A week ago, my friend reached out about his PC booting extremely slowly, taking over an hour. He has one HDD for files and games, while his operating system is installed on a 256GB NVMe SSD. The HDD is split into two 500GB partitions. Here's a breakdown of his specs: 500W power supply, 16GB DDR4 RAM, Intel i5-9600KF CPU, RTX 2070 Super GPU, 1TB SATA HDD, and Windows 10 Pro. After checking the task manager, I saw that the HDD was constantly at 100% activity, making it almost impossible to access any data on it. Although I updated all drivers and deleted temporary files, the desktop icons also took forever to load. When I disabled the HDD via the device manager, the boot time improved dramatically. I'm concerned that something is wrong with the HDD. What other troubleshooting steps can we take to check for hardware issues without just reformatting the drive?
4 Answers
Definitely sounds like a failing hard drive. The system is probably struggling to read from it, which explains the long boot times. I suggest you replace the HDD and move your important data to a new drive before it completely fails.
You can try updating the BIOS and checking the memory with memtest. Also, use tools like CrystalDiskMark to see how the drive is performing. If the drive is having issues even after that, consider running Linux off a USB to rule out any software problems.
It sounds like that HDD might have a lot of bad sectors. I’d recommend replacing it as soon as possible.
Yeah, it definitely seems like the drive is dying. If you still have access to it, back up anything important ASAP.
I did check the BIOS once, and it took a while to load from there too. Now that you mention it, I should look into running some diagnostic tools.