Fixing (C:) on start up

[L3NN0]

When I boot up my PC it loads currently with the message 'Fixing (C Stage 1: 0% (3989 of 534528), Total: 0%, ETA: 210:23:08'. I have a rough understanding that this is related to my hard drive and is doing some sort of check and repair, and this is either caused by some sort of failure in the drive, or turning off the computer by taking out the power cord or in a similar way. A few days ago I turned it off directly at the back switch rather than shutting down properly first.

Is there anything I can do? The ETA is only going up and the percentages are not rising but the absolute value in the 3000s is rising very slowly. I let it run this morning for about 5hrs and it reached 17% with an estimated ETA of 83 hours. Then restarted the PC to try some suggestions online but to no success so now I have restarted the process again.

When I boot I have the option to skip the check by clicking any button which when I do does load my homepage but very slowly and then went to a black screen when I tried to click on something.

Am I best just to leave it for about a week or does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

My PCSpecialist PC specs are as follows:
Case FRACTAL FOCUS G BLACK GAMING CASE (Window)
Processor (CPU) AMD Ryzen 5 1600 Six Core CPU (3.2GHz-3.6GHz/19MB CACHE/AM4)
Motherboard ASUS® STRIX B350-F GAMING (DDR4, USB 3.0, 6Gb/s)
Memory (RAM) 8GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 3000MHz (2 x 4GB)
Graphics Card 6GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1060 - DVI, HDMI, 3 x DP - GeForce GTX VR Ready!
1st Hard Disk 240GB KINGSTON UV400 2.5" SSD, SATA 6 Gb (550MB/R, 490MB/W)
2nd Hard Disk 2TB SATA-III 3.5" HDD, 6GB/s, 7200RPM, 64MB CACHE
DVD/BLU-RAY Drive 24x DUAL LAYER DVD WRITER ±R/±RW/RAM
Power Supply CORSAIR 450W VS SERIES™ VS-450 POWER SUPPLY
Power Cable 1 x 1 Metre UK Power Cable (Kettle Lead)
Processor Cooling STANDARD AMD CPU COOLER
Thermal Paste STANDARD THERMAL PASTE FOR SUFFICIENT COOLING
Sound Card ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)
Wireless/Wired Networking 10/100/1000 GIGABIT LAN PORT (Wi-Fi NOT INCLUDED)
USB Options MIN. 2 x USB 3.0 & 2 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL + MIN. 2 FRONT PORTS
Operating System Genuine Windows 10 Home 64 Bit - inc DVD & Single Licence
Operating System Language United Kingdom - English Language
Windows Recovery Media Windows 10 (64-bit) DVD with paper sleeve

 

[SpyderTracks]

It won't take as long as it states, the timers are notoriously useless.

I'd leave it and let it scan the whole drive.

I take it the C drive is on the SSD?

Once you've got it up and running, assuming windows is on the SSD, then I'd install this and check the health of the drive, could be on the way out:

SSD Manager - Kingston Technology

Kingston® SSD Manager is an application that provides users with the ability to monitor and manage various aspects of their Kingston® Solid State Drive.

www.kingston.com

 

[L3NN0]

It won't take as long as it states, the timers are notoriously useless.

I'd leave it and let it scan the whole drive.

I take it the C drive is on the SSD?

Once you've got it up and running, assuming windows is on the SSD, then I'd install this and check the health of the drive, could be on the way out:

SSD Manager - Kingston Technology

Kingston® SSD Manager is an application that provides users with the ability to monitor and manage various aspects of their Kingston® Solid State Drive.

www.kingston.com

Okay thanks, I shall leave it to run. It is moving very slowly though, about 1 point every ten minutes. The C drive is the SSD. There isn't much on there other than Windows. And thanks for the additional suggestion.

 

[L3NN0]

It won't take as long as it states, the timers are notoriously useless.

I'd leave it and let it scan the whole drive.

I take it the C drive is on the SSD?

Once you've got it up and running, assuming windows is on the SSD, then I'd install this and check the health of the drive, could be on the way out:

SSD Manager - Kingston Technology

Kingston® SSD Manager is an application that provides users with the ability to monitor and manage various aspects of their Kingston® Solid State Drive.

www.kingston.com

It has been running for 48 hours and has reached 3% only. At this rate it will take weeks. What should I do?

 

[SpyderTracks]

It has been running for 48 hours and has reached 3% only. At this rate it will take weeks. What should I do?

There's something truly not right there.

If you force restart it, does it boot into windows? It sounds like the drive has failed.

 

[L3NN0]

There's something truly not right there.

If you force restart it, does it boot into windows? It sounds like the drive has failed.

When I did it last time it offers me to skip the disk check by pressing any button at which point it takes me to my desktop but loads extremely slowly and doesn’t let me do anything. Or it takes me to the disk check.

 

[ubuysa]

Can you boot the Windows installation media? If so select Repair My Computer and see whether Startup Repair can help.

If Startup repair can't help then open a command prompt, navigate to your system drive (it might not be C: in the installation system) and enter the command chkdsk /f /x. This will test (and repair) the filesystem on your system SSD. If that won't run within an hour or if it fails then it's almost certain your SSD is faulty. If it runs to completion and finds errors that it couldn't correct you should attempt a reinstall of Windows (though it's also possible the SSD is faulty).

If you do manage to reinstall Windows, or if you manage to start it enough to run, then run the KingstonSSD manager tool that SpyderTracks linked to earlier, that will check your SSD.

My gut feeling is that your SSD is dead.

 

[L3NN0]

Can you boot the Windows installation media? If so select Repair My Computer and see whether Startup Repair can help.

If Startup repair can't help then open a command prompt, navigate to your system drive (it might not be C: in the installation system) and enter the command chkdsk /f /x. This will test (and repair) the filesystem on your system SSD. If that won't run within an hour or if it fails then it's almost certain your SSD is faulty. If it runs to completion and finds errors that it couldn't correct you should attempt a reinstall of Windows (though it's also possible the SSD is faulty).

If you do manage to reinstall Windows, or if you manage to start it enough to run, then run the KingstonSSD manager tool that SpyderTracks linked to earlier, that will check your SSD.

My gut feeling is that your SSD is dead.

Thanks for the suggestions! For approximately how long should I leave the start up repair running before giving up with it and trying the second suggestion? It has currently been running just over two and a half hours. The only indication of time on screen is ‘This might take over an hour to complete’.

 

[ubuysa]

Thanks for the suggestions! For approximately how long should I leave the start up repair running before giving up with it and trying the second suggestion? It has currently been running just over two and a half hours. The only indication of time on screen is ‘This might take over an hour to complete’.

That's too long. Try the chkdsk command.

Sent using Tapatalk

 

[L3NN0]

That's too long. Try the chkdsk command.

Sent using Tapatalk

It’s been running for over an hour and it has reached a similar point that it reached when I was running the disk check previously, in terms of number of files (about 4000 out of half a million ish) And it’s going really slowly again. It has 4 ‘file record segment F84 is unreadable’ messages with different numbers. And the ETA is over 300 hours.

So it seems like the SSD is gone. What would you suggest I do now? Could I install windows on my other hard drive, boot it, and then extract any files from the C: drive (SSD) that I need. I don’t think there are many. Most of my stuff is on my other hard drive. Or will that not work? Will they be gone?
Will I need to send things off to PCSpecialist?

Thanks again in advance.

 

[ubuysa]

I would say with some confidence now that the SSD is dead. Your HDD should be fine but you can confirm that by navigating to the hard drive (remembering it might not be D: in the installation system) and running a chkdsk /scan on that. That's a fairly gentle drive scan and it should complete on your 2TB drive in about a minute.

That SSD is not that expensive (somewhere around £75) so your easiest option would probably be to just buy another one of the same type. You might try phoning PCS to see whether they agree that your SSD is probably dead and see whether they have a replacement at a reasonable price?

 

[SpyderTracks]

It may well still be in warranty depending on make and model.

 

[L3NN0]

I would say with some confidence now that the SSD is dead. Your HDD should be fine but you can confirm that by navigating to the hard drive (remembering it might not be D: in the installation system) and running a chkdsk /scan on that. That's a fairly gentle drive scan and it should complete on your 2TB drive in about a minute.

That SSD is not that expensive (somewhere around £75) so your easiest option would probably be to just buy another one of the same type. You might try phoning PCS to see whether they agree that your SSD is probably dead and see whether they have a replacement at a reasonable price?

It didn’t run the scan when I tried to do it. Would I be able to, in the mean time, install Windows 10 on my hard drive and carry on using the PC as before?

 

[ubuysa]

It didn’t run the scan when I tried to do it. Would I be able to, in the mean time, install Windows 10 on my hard drive and carry on using the PC as before?

I would remove the SSD first, since it's likely faulty, but yes, you can install Windows on your HDD. You'll need to backup ALL the data on there first though, unless you're familiar with shrinking partitions to make space for Windows. If you just tell the installer to use your HDD you'll likely lose all the data on there.

Why did the chkdsk not run on your HDD? I would want to get a chkdsk /scan run on the HDD to be sure it's good. As I mentioned, your HDD may not show up as drive D: when you're using the installer, you need to keep selecting drives and running a dir command until you find your HDD, then run chkdsk /scan on that drive. If you really can't run chkdsk on the HDD I'd start to think that something more serious is going on...

 

[L3NN0]

I would remove the SSD first, since it's likely faulty, but yes, you can install Windows on your HDD. You'll need to backup ALL the data on there first though, unless you're familiar with shrinking partitions to make space for Windows. If you just tell the installer to use your HDD you'll likely lose all the data on there.

Why did the chkdsk not run on your HDD? I would want to get a chkdsk /scan run on the HDD to be sure it's good. As I mentioned, your HDD may not show up as drive D: when you're using the installer, you need to keep selecting drives and running a dir command until you find your HDD, then run chkdsk /scan on that drive. If you really can't run chkdsk on the HDD I'd start to think that something more serious is going on...

When I try and run the scan on any drive letter it says: ‘The type of file system is NTFS. The specified object was not found. A snapshot error occurred while scanning this drive. Run an offline scan and fix. Failed to transfer logged messages to the event log with status 50.’ Also it seems like from the ‘dir’ that my HDD is now my C drive after removing the SSD. What would you recommend there?

How would I go about backing up all my data if I can’t get onto the PC itself?

 

[ubuysa]

When I try and run the scan on any drive letter it says: ‘The type of file system is NTFS. The specified object was not found. A snapshot error occurred while scanning this drive. Run an offline scan and fix. Failed to transfer logged messages to the event log with status 50.’

Are you running chkdsk from the Windows installation media? It assigns drive letter differently to what you're used to so you have to find out which drive letter has been assigned to your HDD. You do that by selecting each drive letter in turn, so at the command prompt enter C: and when it's witched to the C: drive enter the dir command - this will list the contents of that drive, when you see the directory structure of your HDD that's the one to run chkdsk on.

Also it seems like from the ‘dir’ that my HDD is now my C drive after removing the SSD. What would you recommend there?

Yes that's what will happen. Windows assigns drive letters as it finds the drives.

How would I go about backing up all my data if I can’t get onto the PC itself?

The only way is to buy an external drive caddy (they're only a few pounds), remove your HDD and fit it in the caddy and then ask a friend to plug it into their PC and copy all the data off it. I would do that as a matter of urgency, you need to protect that data in case there is something more seriously wrong.