New
#1
1 HDD corrupts Windows 10 while another slows down drastically
So, in my desktop setup, I have 2 hard drives, one is a 2nd hand 1TB HDD which was, according to the previous owner, "barely used and left sitting around for awhile". I've had windows 10 installed and running well on it for roughly 3-5 weeks. I installed a clean install of Windows 10 on this HDD as my previous Win10 installation had a number of strange issues that I wasn't able to fix and 600GB was starting to prove not big enough anymore. After installing to this 2nd hand 1TB drive, all the issues were fixed and worked without a hitch I even saw some performance improvements in terms of this HDD being faster and more responsive. I kept the previous installation on the 600GB HDD so that I had a bit of redundancy if this 2nd hand drive started playing up.
One day, I decided to boot into the previous installation, I wanted to copy some screenshots over to the new installation's Documents folder, I needed to update permissions so that this old installation had access to the new installation's personal files. This silently failed and just froze the window. So I gave up and rebooted into the new installation. To find that all of the folders that the old installation tried to get access to were now corrupted! I switched to the administrator account, which was fine, and ran chkdsk on the C: Drive to try and fix it. After rebooting and such as is required, the initial files weren't corrupted anymore, but there were now various other problems, including the Start Menu not loading, the taskbar, any explorer.exe processes randomly freezing, and right clicking on anything (be it files, or cmd.exe in Windows 10's search bar) or opening the Run dialogue with Windows + R taking roughly one minute consistently. I eventually managed to get chkdsk running again, but it now freezes at 11% and does nothing for hours.
After giving up on windows to automatically run chkdsk, I went into recovery mode and ran it from the CMD panel from there. This worked, the C: drive was mapped as System Reserved, but I worked around that and got it to finish a chkdsk /v /f /r followed by sfc /scannow in 7 hours (both with the proper tags to ensure they scanned the main partition, not System Reserved). But now it refuses to boot whatsoever. It just stays on the boot animation forever.
So, I gave up on this 2nd hand disk and changed the bios settings so that it now boots into the 600GB HDD by default, including it's old installation of Windows 10 that was buggy. But now it's too slow to be usable, it takes 1 minute for the login text box to accept text after sliding up the lock screen.
Am I mistaken in thinking that one 2nd hand HDD just destroyed 2 Hard Drives? And if not, what's wrong with the 1st hard drive?
This is already a wall of text, but for anyone interested, here's some extra tidbits of information that might be useful;
- All this was done over a 24 hour period.
- The new installation is no longer an activated verson of windows.
- The verbose chkdsk that I ran only reported replacing a number of security IDs for a good 100 or so unnamed files, it didn't report doing anything else.
- The SFC didn't report any changes that it made, but it claimed that it did fix a few system files, that didn't help it get past the boot animation though.