Agonisingly-slow CHKDSK

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John Gray
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Agonisingly-slow CHKDSK

Post by John Gray »

I've been handed a Dell Inspiron 1545 laptop, 900 MHz Celeron, 4 GB memory, 160 Gb hard disk, running Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit. It is operating a g o n i s i n g l y slowly, possibly slower than the 4.77 MHz 8088 of the original IBM PC!

Every time I boot from the hard disk, and try System Repair it produces the usual Windows screen with the bar travelling from left to right, then apparently hangs with just the 'background' screen.

I think there is something wrong with the hard disk, because booting Knoppix and using Partition Magic it shows that the C: drive is 138 GB, but there is no figure for the amount of data used (in fact this is probably about 30 GB).

I broke out the original Dell system CD, and booted it, and it takes at least 20 minutes to get to the point where I can attempt a system repair, and I managed to get it started doing CHKDSK. It's been running about 4 hours now, and on Stage 1 of 5 it has processed just 54000 of 196000 records.

It seems that there is something badly wrong, certainly with the hard disk but possibly also with the CPU. I'm pretty certain that the owner would not have messed with the BIOS, so I can't think what could be causing the problem, other than multiple, multiple hard disk retires (but CHKDSK has found only 12 file segment records to be unreadable out of the 54000-odd processed so far).

Has anyone any suggestions, because at the current rate CHKDSK might take over a week to finish!
John Gray

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viking33
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Re: Agonisingly-slow CHKDSK

Post by viking33 »

John, Are there files or data that you need to try to retain or just trying to restore the system back to reasonable operating condition?
I was going to suggest a Repair reinstall from the CD which would just install the OS and leave files alone but I'm not familiar enough with Dell to know if there is such an option on their recovery disk.
Reformatting the C: drive and trying to reinstall fresh from the Dell Recovery CD?
BOB
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John Gray
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Re: Agonisingly-slow CHKDSK

Post by John Gray »

No, there is nothing on the disk that I want to save, but System Repair apparently did nothing (presumably it was running just about as slow as CHKDSK, 65000 records processed at the time of typing). I'm not sure whether a reformat will be faster or slower than CHKDSK, or whether either will end up being successful. I am coming to the conclusion that the hard disk is probably ill in some way, and if the laptop is worth saving it might be necessary to spend £30-£40 for a new 2½" hard disk.

Incidentally, has anyone ever managed to recreate a three-partition Dell hard disk, which has
  • very small initial partition, one or two GB
  • System Recovery partition, 10 GB
  • Windows 7 partition, 138 GB
Usually the whole disk is reformatted, and a single C: drive partition set up.
John Gray

Venison is quiet deer, and quite dear.

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John Gray
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Re: Agonisingly-slow CHKDSK

Post by John Gray »

I suddenly remembered the Dell diagnostics, so downloaded the Inspiron 1545 variant, and found that the hard disk has many 'unable to read' errors, for each of which it suggests that the hard disk be changed.

I've found a 'spare' 2½" SATA disk and installed it, and am currently spending many happy hours installing what will probably well over 200 updates to the Windows 7 Home Premium that I put on the disk. The Celeron processor is really slow, and runs at 100% just for much of the Windows Updates.
John Gray

Venison is quiet deer, and quite dear.