Malware or drive failure? Machine is crippled

Hello,
My gaming rig has recently been brought to it's knees. Windows 10 is able to boot up (a bit slowly), but afterwards, I am not able to do anything. I've seen everything stop by hovering over the icons in my taskbar (the hovering animations froze), the animation over the start menu remain while nothing happening...etc.

I am able to move the mouse and the keyboard responds. Loading what icons I have on my desktop takes a few minutes.

I am not sure if this is a result of malware of a driver failure - but I am pretty sure it is the hard drive, as I put it in a second machine and saw the same slow results.

I have tried accessing the troubleshooting methods that will pop up on the boot screen. I let it attempt to restore an older point for about 24 hours, and I let it attempt to reinstall windows while keeping my files for about 17 hours.
Through this same menu I accessed safe mode and it everything stopped responding very shortly there as well.

I recall doing 2 things before this started happening - I updated Nvidia drivers which did give me an error at first (don't remember what), and I also noticed that Malware Bytes wasn't turning on with Windows and I tried out the "self-protection" thing. I'm wondering if perhaps all my resources are being used up with the 2 fighting it out (the possible malware and malware bytes)... but I'm not sure if that would be expected to slow down everything else I described, like reinstalling Windows.

Any tips?

simrick said:

Hi adamgm and welcome to Tenforums.
You can see if it is indeed an infection by booting to Kyhi's rescue media, and running MBAM on your HDD that way, while it's not active (use the mirror to download). You can also run chkdsk while in that environment to see if your drive is failing. Please make sure you set MBAM to scan for rootkits (that's not check by default), treat PUPs and PUMs as malware,and do the custom scan to get the entire drive. While you're at it, back up your data, if you need to.

Let us know how it goes.

Thanks for the response!
An iso on a usb is just copied to it?

simrick said:

Yes, right-click the ISO and select MOUNT, then copy all the files to your USB.

EDIT: Please make sure you update the virus definitions in MBAM before you run it.

I will give this a shot tomorrow and will post back.

Hey this could also be a problem with a runaway process, did you check the task manager to see if your disk, cpu or memory performance is pegged at a high percent? It also could be a problem with hardware like the hard drive if you find the machine is freezing, locking up or rebooting.

trinsic said:

Hey this could also be a problem with a runaway process, did you check the task manager to see if your disk, cpu or memory performance is pegged at a high percent? It also could be a problem with hardware like the hard drive if you find the machine is freezing, locking up or rebooting.

I wasn't even able to open the task manager unfortunately - so I have no idea. I considered this and tried to check...

simrick said:

Sounds like a plan. :)

So, I'm in using the rescue media and ran chkdsk, looks like it found problems:

EDIT: that's embarrassing, I forgot to change to my actual hard drive.
Secondary drive that doesn't have windows on it was fine. Currently running it on my main drive, the only suspicious thing (maybe) is that it now re-named it to F instead of E.

trinsic said:

Hey this could also be a problem with a runaway process, did you check the task manager to see if your disk, cpu or memory performance is pegged at a high percent? It also could be a problem with hardware like the hard drive if you find the machine is freezing, locking up or rebooting.

simrick said:

Yeah, typical when you boot to the WinPESE environment. Will be good to know if it checks out okay or not. Did you run MBAM yet, or no?

Not yet, started with checkdisk.
It's still running on my main drive, not sure if taking this long is indicative of something. It has stopped for a few minutes at 2 points.