no reason laptop lagFollow

after the recent windows auto update, my computer seems to be grinding to a screeching halt. Slow to start up [only msn opens at the start automaticly], log in, etc.

Everything is slow to repsond or stops responding. Odd thing is that the task manager shows normal values, nothing chewing up huge loads of ram or power. have Toshiba Satellite, 4 gb ram. Windows 7. Please feel free to mention any details i should be adding, 3 40 am, so brainy, no worky.

oh and my drive is partitioned. the storage drive, my D Drive, has become inaccessible. cant even right click it without explorer.exe crashing. System restore is stuck in "waiting" so no go there. for a few hours a while back my computer stopped believing it was authentic but that went away recently. Security essentials revealed no malware, though by the time it triesto scan D Drive, it freezes.

all the stuff that shows how stuff is performing, either in quantitative measures or qualitative ranks, shows everything is "good". My ***.




Edited, May 5th 2011 11:42pm by Tenjen

Right click My Computer, hit properties of your D drive, and tell it to perform a full chkdsk including checking for bad sectors and repairing them. Let this run; it may take a while.

Then go get a free little program called HD Tune. The 15 day free trial will be enough. Install it and click on the Info tab for your D drive. If anything is highlighted, then it means there is a physical problem with the HDD.

Yeah, it sounds like there is physical damage to the drive if it's not even accessible.

If you know how to open the BIOS, make sure that S.M.A.R.T. is enabled for disk drives. For some reason it is often disabled from new in box systems or laptops. HD Tune will also read the smart data, as will a handy little freeware app called Speedfan (which is primarily used to monitor temperatures.) The smart data is a chip embedded in the HDD to warn you of anything strange happening with the disk.

Yep I figured as much since it's a laptop. But it can still have physical damage on it, even if the partition that is the C drive is doing fine.

You might be able to recover your data by downloading a free bootable linux disk called Knoppix, booting to it, and then using it to transfer your files on to a large flash drive. Windows likely won't ever be able to see your data, because it looks like you lost some of the rather important parts of the drive that deal with the MFT, etc. Linux bypasses that entirely. With a laptop drive, its most likely physical damage, it could also be virus related. You really want to try and get a SSD in there at some point if you can to eliminate that damage potential.

Try chkdsk on it from windows recovery console