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Hard disk problem? Windows 10 does not boot on HDD or USB
My friend's computer recently had an issue where Windows 10 would not boot. He said the last thing he did before this issue occurred was installing "ElectraX," a program I didn't recognize. When the issue occurred, the loading screen with the HP logo and the rotating circles loading icon would show, but then the screen would turn black and nothing more would happen, that is if it actually loaded. After a few boots it would attempt to boot in Automatic Repair mode, but the same issue would occur, where it would get stuck on a black screen.
I then tried to recover Windows 10 by using a USB flash drive Windows 10 installation medium. However, it also did not boot on this computer, as it showed the loading screen then a black screen, yet when I ran it on my computer, the purple screen where you start the Windows 10 installation process appeared. I verified that it was in fact loading from the USB by ejecting it from my friend's computer when it was loading, which resulted in a blank blue screen appearing. Yet, when I did it after the loading icon appeared, the loading process continued and then went into the black screen. This seems inconsistent with the other results.
After a while, I guessed that something might be wrong with the hard drive. To try and diagnose the issue, I used a USB flash drive with Parted Magic to check for S.M.A.R.T. data on the hard drive. The hard drive reports itself to be a 500 GB 5400 RPM mechanical drive. Apparently, the hard drive had over 5000 errors recorded. In addition, some clusters were labeled as bad and their locations had to be changed, suggesting hard drive damage.
Something that further suggests hard drive issues is that when I boot into Fatdog64 to inspect the hard disk partitions, there was a one minute delay for the partitions to be mounted, which is abnormally and extremely long as it normally takes about 5 seconds to do on my own computers. I tried to back up data on the hard drive to an external hard drive but were only able to back up some of the data as I accidentally unplugged the drive during the backup process.
The issue is still occurring, and I need advice on where to go next to try and repair the system. Please give your thoughts on what I should do. Thank you.
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