Failed harddisk rewindows help

[Tom]

Hi all,

My grandads computer gave him some kind of "smart" message telling him his hard disk is going to fail imminently? So he bought a knew one, exactly the same spec, same brand same everything.

Que typical old man moaning that he wanted it to be copied over exactly, so i researched taking a system image, pretty simple following windows things to do it and made a boot disk. So old drive out, new one in, boot from disk, recover from image done all that, took ages. Once that was done it booted up but it was really slow, slow to boot, slow to use, just pretty much un usable.

Again more research and people reccommended a fresh install, so got a copy of windows installed that, took a while but it worked, and once it was running was pretty quick, so i left him to it. He installs his AVG and some printer programs and it slows right down, so i went back to have a look, windows has got a shit load of updates to do, started it on them and the pc is unusable at this point, so i pressed restart and it took about an hour to do 11 updates before it switched off. So then it comes back on with a message about installing updates sometimes it gets stuck at preparing to configure updates sometimes it gets stuck at 35% and others it gets stuck at 70% but it sits there for a while then switches off and starts again and gets stuck at one of those points again. So now im at the point where i cant even boot it anymore and it just seems so painfully slow. I need some help with what to do.


Pc is a HP Pavillion P6 2010UK
Operating system is Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit

Thanks for any help guys xx

[itone24]

I would reinstall windows and install all the updates before you do anything else, save all his docs and stuff to his profile in c:\users\his name and save it to a memory stick first then a fresh install, the version of windows on the disk is well out of dates and there will be a ton of updates to do, do them all, will take a while but the system will run better once installed and rebooted, make sure it picks up the ram, it can become unseated from the motherboard.

how much ram does the system have? its pretty cheap to biy, 4g will be perfect, 2 is ok but will slow it down slightly.

hope this helps mate

[Tom]

The board can have upto 8gb of ram but it only comes with one 4gb stick from factory.

[itone24]

one stick is not the best but should be ok as long as not doing anything too strenuous, I think if you wipe it and install the os again and install the updates firat it should be fine mate

[Eeyore]

amazingly i am having almost the same problem with my dads pc.

I built it for him last year and the system drive is a solid state disk. More specifically an OCZ agility 3 120GB. Its only half a year old and now the smart message comes up and boot and windows flags it once it has loaded too! We have bought a new SSD which ill be installing windows on this weekend. Hopefully it wont get stuck updating like yours!

[Tom]

amazingly i am having almost the same problem with my dads pc.

I built it for him last year and the system drive is a solid state disk. More specifically an OCZ agility 3 120GB. Its only half a year old and now the smart message comes up and boot and windows flags it once it has loaded too! We have bought a new SSD which ill be installing windows on this weekend. Hopefully it wont get stuck updating like yours!

Mum works for a computer place and strangely the first question the guys there asked me (i phoned in for a consultation aha) was is it a SSD. They said they're seen a batch of faulty ones lately!


But yeah anyway with my problem, i brought the pc home with me and stuck it on the samsung 43 incher! I just formatted all the hard drive partitions and re installed windows 7, then re installed all the drivers for the machine, then done windows update and installed all 103, its now downloading windows 7 sp1 so i can install that aswell, all going well so far thankfully!

[Tom]

Sp1 installed all the way through, then it rebooted and said it cant boot into windows because the registry is corrupt, fucksake. Downloaded a program to check the hard disk put it on a cd and ran it and the results were...



Bear in mind the hard drive was brand new just the other day.

[itone24]

Gutted, back to the shop for a new one, have you got your receipt, it can happen mate, nothing you have done

[Tom]

Does that mean the hard disk is nackered? I need a definite tbh before i try and return it.

[me-tm]

Yes, HDD is fuckered. Get it refunded / replaced.

[Tom]

Formatted and put a fresh copy of windows on there, ran disk checker again less bad sectors but still 10% health. Bugger.

[itone24]

Yeah defo knackered mate, 100%

[Tom]

Why would that be?

[me-tm]

Manufacturing fault, whatever. Shit happens.

[Tom]

f*ckers.