[Tech] Hard drive testing tools

[Nanor]

Good morning angels,

I did a fresh install of Windows 8 on my laptop. Was running great until I started it up this morning to find it running like complete and utter dog shit. Everything takes an age. The hard drive makes some funky noises when it starts up so my powers of reasoning have deduced that's the problem. Is there any way I can test my hard drive before I boot?

Boot the OS that is, not the laptop out a window.

 

[Nanor]

Hrm, so it's not my hard drive after all. Managed to get into safe mode and everything is running dandy. When I'm not in safe mode something is using all my hard drive capacity but the highest thing is Firefox at 0.1MB/s.

Anyone any ideas?

 

[Ronin Storm]

I guess you're looking for boot-time processes. Things that come to mind:

Windows Backup
AV Scan
Windows Search Indexer
Boot time defrag
Crash minidump

Does it recover if you give it a bit?

 

[Nanor]

Nope, not at all. I can do things I've already done before smooth as I like. Say I opened the new Start Screen I can switch between that and the desktop smooth sailing but if I try to do something new, like load a new program, it will just hang for ages.

I tried a system restore which failed and told me to run a chkdsk /r so I'm doing that now.

 

[SgtFury]

Windows Search/Indexer???? being a fresh install it might be checking all your files? I know that was a pain with our work computers.

 

[Nanor]

I don't think it's that. The chkdsk I'm running at the minute has been hanging on 27% for 20 minutes. Off to Uni so I'll leave it until I come back and see what the story is.

If I do come back and it's still at 27% is it safe to just hard shut down my laptop mid chkdsk?

 

[Ronin Storm]

If I do come back and it's still at 27% is it safe to just hard shut down my laptop mid chkdsk?

I'd give it more than a couple of hours before giving up on that process, especially for a larger drive.

However, I can't say for certain whether chkdsk is safe to cancel mid process.

 

[Nanor]

Well my chkdsk /r has located no problems.

 

[Nanor]

Huh, well, fixed it. Turns out having the optical drive enabled on my laptop was causing the problem. Disabled it and now it runs the way it did before. Strange. Had the same problem on my desktop for a while too.