Fixing Harddrive?

Hi,
My son has a Dell laptop that was working fine till 2 nights ago.
It was running over night and when he looked at it he found the following:

Fixing (c:) Stage 1:19% (170788 to 886784); Total: 6%; ETA: 21:05:55

He tells me the ETA number changes once in a while. other than that he is stuck right there

Any one know on what is going on?
Can I just turn it off and reboot?
Thanks

That depends on how much you value what is on the hard drive.

so you are saying let it play? it has been running more than a day and the eta is 20 hours more

Sven1458 said:

so you are saying let it play? it has been running more than a day and the eta is 20 hours more

The hard drive is probably toast. The best chance you have of recovering data off it is probably to hard power off the computer, remove the hard drive and put it in a USB enclosure. Connect it to a computer running Windows, or even better Linux and see what you can save off it.

Thanks,For now i will let it play, hopfully it will save the drive. If not, then i will have to get a new drive

Sven1458 said:

Thanks,For now i will let it play, hopfully it will save the drive. If not, then i will have to get a new drive

I agree with NavyLCDR, it sounds like the drive is too badly corrupted to repair and that the best you can hope for is that the user files can be recovered.

The alternative to removing the drive and using it in a drive enclosure to recover files is to boot something else from a usb. A W10 install usb or a W10 recovery drive can boot to a command prompt in Advanced Startup. Then files could be copied to another usb drive. See options four or five here:

Boot to Advanced Startup Options in Windows 10

For a more familiar Windows environment then Kyhi's bootable rescue disk could be used.

Windows 10 Recovery Tools - Bootable Rescue Disk

If you have a Macrium rescue usb, that has a built-in Explorer tool that could be used to copy files off the hard drive to another usb.

A Linux Live usb is another option.

Thanks to both of you,
for now the system is still trying to repair the drive. i will let it be for a while longer, i could get lucky and it works
still hoping

- - - Updated - - -

I left it allone and do whatever it wanted and when i came back and looked at it it tells me: no boot device found. So i incerted my windows 10 USB drive and installed windows again and low and behold, it worked. the repair must have broken windows. it did create a windows.old file, but I could not find any usable files that my son had on it, but at least he got his computer back

If and when the hard drive suddenly makes strange buzzing, clicking, banging or humming sounds most of the time (sounds that are out of the ordinary), then it's time to have it replaced as soon as possible