Cannot reset my Windows 10 laptop whatever I try... please help

Hello,

my Windows 10 laptop is not working well. The HDD is stuck on 100% usage permanently, which makes everything incredibly slow, and it's basically unusable. I've tried everything to fix that - disabling windows search, various tweaks suggested online, basically every reasonable suggestion the internet has to offer. But nothing has worked. So I've got no option but to reset the PC and reinstall Windows.

Unfortunately, when I tried to reset I got the "there was a problem resetting your PC, no changes have been made" error. So I looked up what to do, and ran everything suggested: the DSIM restorehealth thing, sfc /scannow, etc etc. They didn't work at first, but finally I got them to work and it told me errors had been found and repaired. Great. I ran them both again and there were no issues detected. Maybe this had fixed the problems and I wouldn't have to reset? But no, the PC still didn't work right and the HDD use was still stuck on 100%.

So I tried to reset again... but it still didn't work, even after supposedly fixing the system files which were causing problems. This time I didn't even get the "no changes were made" screen - it just started resetting then (after a while) the screen went dark and it restarted the computer normally and booted me back into Windows, same as usual. Tried this three times. Same thing happened every time.

So I dug out my Windows 10 installation USB (supplied by Hewlett Packard when my hard drive had to be replaced a month after buying the laptop) and tried to reinstall from there. But I got the error: "required device isn't connected". Even though it was.

I've completely run out of ideas. Please help!

Thanks very much. Ideally I would like to keep my personal files - they're all backed up but it would save me a lot of time and hassle. Can you still do that if you reinstall using this method? (At this point I'll probably do it even if you can't, but I'd like to know.) It doesn't say on the download page.

It had crossed my mind that it could be a hardware issue, partly because the original hard drive which came with the laptop failed spectacularly after a few weeks of use and they replaced it with a presumably identical one. Is there a good (and easy) way to test the integrity of the HDD? I know very little about hardware.

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Incidentally, this is what Task Manager is showing. Maxed out disk usage but hardly any apparent activity.

Chopo said:

It had crossed my mind that it could be a hardware issue, partly because the original hard drive which came with the laptop failed spectacularly after a few weeks of use and they replaced it with a presumably identical one. Is there a good (and easy) way to test the integrity of the HDD? I know very little about hardware.

- - - Updated - - -

Incidentally, this is what Task Manager is showing. Maxed out disk usage but hardly any apparent activity.

(snip)

Windows includes a basic utility. Launch a command window with admin privileges. (Type "cmd", without the quotes, into the Windows search box. Choose to run it as administrator.)

In the command windows, enter: chkdsk c:

See what it reports.

You can also run chkdsk /f c:. That is supposed to "repair" the disk. (It marks bad sectors, and prevents their use.) Once you've entered that, the system will request a reboot to run the utility. Some may use it as a stopgap measure with a failing disk.

You're probably right about starting from scratch being just as easy in the long term. I guess I'll just do that.

Something else I forgot to mention - when I was backing up my newest files before doing this reset, a few individual files - mp3s and mp4s - wouldn't transfer over to the external drive. Read/write error of some sort. The files play fine on my computer in VLC, but they can't be transferred onto another drive and I'm wondering what has gone wrong there. I took one of the mp3s, opened it in Audacity, changed a couple of variables, saved it as a new mp3, and transferred that over. That worked fine. Something weird is going on here.

I hope it's not a failing drive - this laptop's only two years old, and as I said, the original drive failed without warning in the first few weeks. So the current drive is less than two years old. Is this common with HP laptops?? Haven't noticed any of the usual signs - it's not whirring loudly or clicking. But it sounds like a real possibility.

I don't understand anything about that Task Manager reading at all. The list of processes is constantly changing, I think faster than usual, but apart from notorious resource hog Google Chrome, nothing ever seems to be using much of the computer's capability. Occasionally the disk usage drops down to what you'd expect - 3% or something - and stays there for a while, but then I open a program and it'll shoot straight back up to 100%. Or sometimes it won't. Very confusing.

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bobkn said:

In the command windows, enter: chkdsk c:

See what it reports.

Stage 1: Examining basic file system structure ...
743680 file records processed.
File verification completed.
Phase duration (File record verification): 1.59 minutes.
24686 large file records processed.
Phase duration (Orphan file record recovery): 0.00 milliseconds.
0 bad file records processed.
Phase duration (Bad file record checking): 0.85 milliseconds.

Stage 2: Examining file name linkage ...
67902 reparse records processed.
952958 index entries processed.
Index verification completed.
Phase duration (Index verification): 4.34 minutes.
0 unindexed files scanned.
Phase duration (Orphan reconnection): 3.56 seconds.
0 unindexed files recovered to lost and found.
Phase duration (Orphan recovery to lost and found): 0.91 milliseconds.
67902 reparse records processed.
Phase duration (Reparse point and Object ID verification): 334.23 milliseconds.

Stage 3: Examining security descriptors ...
Security descriptor verification completed.
Phase duration (Security descriptor verification): 229.65 milliseconds.
104640 data files processed.
Phase duration (Data attribute verification): 1.13 milliseconds.
CHKDSK is verifying Usn Journal...
36796208 USN bytes processed.
Usn Journal verification completed.
Phase duration (USN journal verification): 359.29 milliseconds.

Windows has scanned the file system and found no problems.
No further action is required.

975468543 KB total disk space.
938134392 KB in 428822 files.
319820 KB in 104641 indexes.
20 KB in bad sectors.
884267 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
36130044 KB available on disk.

4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
243867135 total allocation units on disk.
9032511 allocation units available on disk.
Total duration: 6.01 minutes (360901 ms).

The computer didn't enjoy doing it, though. Before I started, the disk usage had dropped to 4%. This is what things looked like while it was running:

The "20kB in bad sectors" doesn't sound great. I get nothing like that for my C: drive (1TB M.2 SSD). chkdsk runs quite quickly on that.

I don't know whether to recommend running it again with the /f flag, to mark the bad sectors. May be worth a try, if you have the time.

It may also be worth running HD diagnostics from the drive's manufacturer. I don't see that you've identified the disk, so I can't look for a link to download that.