help, "windows 10 suddenly unusably slow/not responding"

Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.
So 24 hours ago my system was working. Now all the sudden it doesn't seem to. And i've no clue whats even going on. Was there some windows update I wasn't aware of that's screwing up PC's? If the hard drive was failing would windows know and tell me? Not sure where else to ask as i'm not very active on other forums right now.

Also this is horrific timing as i'm in the middle of editing final projects for college and I can't even get off my footage all the sudden.

My current video editing rig has an AMD phenom-ii 6 core (think its a thuban or something), 24gigs ram, four hard drives (two 3gig two 1gig), and a windows 10 upgrade from previous paid windows 7. All the sudden, sometime today, it just became... unusable... cpu at 1%, not much memory use, hard drive says 20% use (but no obvious tasks doing anything), and everything is so sluggish i cant even browse the menu. Rebooting the PC takes over half an hour, if it comes back up at all. I can't even get to a safe mode - auto repair failed, and it wont even give me the option to boot in safe mode. My friend who came over pulling the drive to put in a usb dock on his PC to read the files had it say something about couldn't access drives over 2tb due to some formatting not supported (everything is on the 3tb drives, mirrored, neither of which were accessible via his dock) and since i'm not an expert computer person i'm suddenly pulling my hair out.

I can think of no reason the computer should suddenly give this problem (nothing was installed, added, I dont even think I remember seeing a windows update message), none of the normal repair methods like rebooting/ auto repair/ safe mode are doing anything, and I dont even know what the next steps are when i cant even do anything.

Help? Does anyone have any suggestions and ideas of what to do or try next? I dont even know how to start ruling out if it coulda been a virus or malware or rootkit or update when I cant even get to a normal, usable, windows menu, to load anything to start with... even the boot process before windows itself shows up seems impossibly slow (before I ever see a login prompt) so i'm wondering if something could have happened to the hard drive, thats not reported, but makes it 1/20th the speed because that's how it's running...
 

darkconz

Member
Jun 6, 2013
193
15
18
There is a chance that the controller on your motherboard has issues or potentially just your hard drive decided to fail.

When you said everything is on the 3tb drives, mirrored, is that the OS drive as well? Are all 4 drives connected to the same controller which does the mirroring?

If the two 1tb were also connected to the same controller as the two mirrored 3tb’s, I suggest pulling those out, put them on a USB dock and see if you could read those drives. If not then it would further confirm the likelihood of controller failure is higher.

As for how you could retrieve your data, I am not sure, maybe rather than using a USB dock, try a direct connection to another motherboard. Maybe you’ll have better luck then.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 

i386

Well-Known Member
Mar 18, 2016
4,221
1,540
113
34
Germany
Did you check the temperatures (cpu, raid controller/hba or chipset)?
My friend who came over pulling the drive to put in a usb dock on his PC to read the files had it say something about couldn't access drives over 2tb due to some formatting not supported (everything is on the 3tb drives, mirrored, neither of which were accessible via his dock)
I have a cheap wintech ide+sata to usb 2.0 adapter and I know it's the chip used that doesn't support 2+ tb drives. Like @darkconz said try sata ports on the mainboard instead.
 
Tried to get some sleep realizing I probably wont tomorrow night.

Drives arent mirrored, just my important data. Ie different data on each drive, except I back up my video directory to the other 3tb drive. It just means I couldn't pull the data from either drive (due to the over 2tb issue) with the drive dock I had access to.

All 4 drives connected to the built in motherboard controller along with DVDrom, no extra cards.

I'm wondering what would happen if I plugged drives into different channels to use a different controller channel, would windows have some way of recognizing/accessing "whatever my original C D E drives were" despite being on different channels or would it get wonky or even damage data... I havent tried it yet, just on the list.

Anyone have any links to instant-use liveDVD's(or preferably liveUSB stick) that can access whatever format and type windows 10 would have formatted a modern 3TB drive to? :-/ If I can get the data off my drive I at least can work on it on school computers. I have 26 hours left to when my project is due now.
 
Last edited:

William

Well-Known Member
May 7, 2015
789
252
63
66
Do you have HPET turned on ?

I had this hit me on my X399 platform. Turned HPET off fixed this for me.

Open a CMD with admin and type this.
bcdedit /deletevalue useplatformclock
 

pricklypunter

Well-Known Member
Nov 10, 2015
1,708
515
113
Canada
Boot your favourite Linux Live distro and copy your files over to a USB disk, that way you can get your College stuff done at least, fixing the mess Win10 is in can come later.

I have a soft spot for the Mate desktop on Debian, but pretty much any modern Linux will do :)
 
Do you have HPET turned on ?

I had this hit me on my X399 platform. Turned HPET off fixed this for me.

Open a CMD with admin and type this.
bcdedit /deletevalue useplatformclock
I'm not even sure what HPET is, also did your problem start later or exist from the beginning? This system ran win 7 fine for years, and upgrade to 10 fine for the last 18 months or so - only sunday did it sh_t the bed. I can't even seem to get back to the desktop or a task manager, I can't seem to get into safe mode because windows wont let me - it tries to "auto repair" and locks solid or never finishes even 2 hours later on reboot attempts. The one time I did get to a desktop loading Notepad took 20 minutes.


Boot your favourite Linux Live distro and copy your files over to a USB disk, that way you can get your College stuff done at least, fixing the mess Win10 is in can come later.

I have a soft spot for the Mate desktop on Debian, but pretty much any modern Linux will do :)
Can you recommend one that will work with whatever newest NTFS or whatever format Windows 10 would have natively formatted the drive to be? Along with 4k sectors, GPT instead of MBR, modern over 2tb disks and similar? I haven't used a live distro in many years so am out of touch with what will work on newer stuff...
 

William

Well-Known Member
May 7, 2015
789
252
63
66
I did a fresh install of Win 10 Pro which ran for a few weeks just fine.
This is on a X399 system with a Threadripper.
HPET is High Precision Event Timer.

It hit me out of the blue a few days ago. It was so bad I was going to do another fresh install or move back to my old workstation.
My mouse pointer movement was very sluggish and would continue moving for a bit after I stopped moving the mouse. OS performance was also very bad, games that ran at 60FPS before ground down to 10FPS and became unplayable.

I am not sure what happened with HPET but from what I gather it was enabled by ASUS AI Suite 3 which I have unistalled.
Once I ran that command my system came back to normal. There appears to be a bug that is making sensors in the TR CPU go nuts when HPET is enabled.

You do not need to go into safe mode to run that command.

The other problem I had was with SMT on TR. This was with a game Star Citizen. SC would simply not allow me to connect to the PU or if I did it would crash SC after a minute or two. One I disabled SMT or Hyperthreading SC ran fine.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Twice_Shy

pricklypunter

Well-Known Member
Nov 10, 2015
1,708
515
113
Canada
Can you recommend one that will work with whatever newest NTFS or whatever format Windows 10 would have natively formatted the drive to be?
Debian with Mate Desktop or Ubuntu Desktop would be my go to distro's, but pretty much any modern live distro should work fine :)
 

darkconz

Member
Jun 6, 2013
193
15
18
I think the best bet is to plug those drives into ANOTHER motherboard’s ports. It could be the on board controller that went funky and if that is the case, and you are still trying to rescue data with this controller, I can only image more harm is being done to he hard drives.

Speaking of which, to confirm if your friend’s USB dock is limited by the 2tb size, you could try to put your 1tb drives in it and see if it can read the entire drive. If the 1tb drives work then there are more reason to pull all the drives off that motherboard and recover data on another motherboard.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
HPET is High Precision Event Timer.

You do not need to go into safe mode to run that command.
I will give that a shot if I can ever get back to a running desktop at all. It never even gets there now.


I think the best bet is to plug those drives into ANOTHER motherboard’s ports.
I completely agree, but a working spare PC I don't have access to right now. Not in the remaining 18 hours til the project is due. The friend who came over was using a laptop with the dock.
 
What model is your motherboard?
ASUS M5A97 AM3+ AMD 970 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard with UEFI BIOS - Newegg.com ASUS M5A97 AM3+ AMD 970 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard with UEFI BIOS

Also, wierdest thing in the world happened between last evening class and getting home. IT'S BACK UP. Sort of.

I got to a desktop, everything seems "as it was" as far as data being intact (no obviously missing/changed things like many trojans would do "give us money to unlock your PC") it's just still UNUSABLY SLOW IN WINDOWS. Took about 30 mins to get to a login screen, then another 40 minutes before some version of windows could be seen. Loading Windows Explorer took another 40 minutes. I started a process to try and copy my directory to an external USB and now it's sat for like an hour without response - I dont know when or if it will start.

Strange behavior - one of the drives shared on the network seems to work fine, four fairly large video files copied off no problem.

The problem - my Premiere directory was not one of those shared objects. So while i'm waiting for Explorer to ever respond again in this life i'm hoping to try to put the directory into share (instead of copying from windows) as the next step.


My point - it's theoretically possible that i'm back to a command prompt, loading the simplest/smallest of programs, etc. So if people want to tell me things to try taking into account the 13hrs left to my project (and I think I need 4 hours to finish my edit so... maybe 9 hours unless i'm sloppy), and a computer response time of an hour for the simplest smallest windows things, please help prioritize. >_<

I havent yet reloaded Task Manager because each previous time it took about 30-40 minutes to load that up and I assumed the same this time - was trying to JUST get to copying. Please note that attempting this thru windows is preventing me using the USB livedistro linux too.
 

Netwerkz101

Active Member
Dec 27, 2015
308
90
28
Strange behavior - one of the drives shared on the network seems to work fine, four fairly large video files copied off no problem.

The problem - my Premiere directory was not one of those shared objects. So while i'm waiting for Explorer to ever respond again in this life i'm hoping to try to put the directory into share (instead of copying from windows) as the next step.
So, can you connect to the admin share of each drive and copy normally?
 
So, can you connect to the admin share of each drive and copy normally?
Not now, the computer just crashed again while trying to make it share the drive on the network. Starting the probably multi hour reboot process.

11 hours til project due.

Remind me again how/is there some way to directly access an admin share (if not normally shared - i only had a few directories shared and only saw those remotely) or do I have to configure things on the (currently broken PC) side if it comes back up?
 

Netwerkz101

Active Member
Dec 27, 2015
308
90
28
Admin share = [drive letter]$ ... ie:
C: drive would have an admin share of C$
E: drive would have an admin share of E$

and so on ..

To access.. use UNC: \\servername(or ip address)\c$

IIRC - admin shares still on by default
 
Admin share = [drive letter]$ ... ie:
C: drive would have an admin share of C$
E: drive would have an admin share of E$

and so on ..

To access.. use UNC: \\servername(or ip address)\c$

IIRC - admin shares still on by default
I remember seeing that before but I didn't understand how that was set up to be honest. Ie - if it was the system being accessed (what will now be 'damaged') or if it was the system doing the accessing (ie logged into windows in some way, that when accessing the network, I can see their root directories).

I dont understand why i've seen it at some times over my LAN and not at other times... if I ever get back to a running windows desktop I can try to either set up something or access it that way if you can explain to me what to do. (but I did not see admin shares from the accessing laptop that I copied video files to at full speed) So on the network share in theory I should just be able to type \\ADOBEBOX\c$ if I get back to windows? (adobebox is the name of the AMD machine thats having this failing)

Sorry if I need a bit of handholding but high stress and no sleep and multitasking studying for a different final are sort of throwing me into a loopy state... :( Worst possible of all timing for this whole computer problem to occur...

--
Minor update - I tried swapping the boot drive (one of the 1tb drives - fwiw my video data I need is on the two 3tb drives) after the latest crash to different SATA channels (from SATA1 to SATA5 and then SATA6) with no change - still hopelessly slow to boot. So I dont think it's a motherboard failure, perhaps the drive board on the hard drive itself suddenly started to fail out of the blue... despite not showing physical drive errors that should show windows messages.

Second minor update - tried reinstalling windows 10 to a bought 4tb drive and it refuses to do so, I dont understand why, and I dont have time to argue with it either.

So i'm now trying to find/build a USB bootable linux, to see if I can get the PC up that way and access my two 3tb drives with video data on it - long enough to export/copy to another external drive. :- P Perhaps I should have done that hours ago i'm just so unfamiliar with it and it seemed SO CLOSE to coming back to life a few times here stringing me along... but that's what i'm doing next.
 
Last edited:

Netwerkz101

Active Member
Dec 27, 2015
308
90
28
Yes ... UNC: \\AdobeBox\[DriveLetter]$ if your laptop can see it by name.
\\[AdobeBox's IP Address]\[DriveLetter]$ if your laptop cannot see it by name (but on same network).

Adobebox only needs File/Print sharing enabled and firewall disabled or configured to allow File/Print Sharing traffic.


Per your last paragraph ..lesson learned ... if the data is important to you, back it up (3-2-1).
 
  • Like
Reactions: Twice_Shy
Yes ... UNC: \\AdobeBox\[DriveLetter]$ if your laptop can see it by name.
\\[AdobeBox's IP Address]\[DriveLetter]$ if your laptop cannot see it by name (but on same network).

Adobebox only needs File/Print sharing enabled and firewall disabled or configured to allow File/Print Sharing traffic.


Per your last paragraph ..lesson learned ... if the data is important to you, back it up (3-2-1).
Thanks for the specifics - I will use that if I get back to a Windows session again. (that said useful update THANK YOU UBUNTU for working - a liveUSB version was able to access the NTFS volumes with my video files and my USB external to copy the files over. I haven't tested the video files to be sure nothing is damaged but that'll be next once I run to school. Project due in 9 hours, with no sleep I should be able to finish it in four and study for my morning final in the remaining five. Go Red Bull.)

Data is always important to me. Just sometimes mistakes are made, distraction-fatigue piles up and money is not always available for The Right Way - having data on mirrored drives was sort of a backup but not proofed against OS failure.. in the mad scramble focused exclusively on academics other things slid like my normal level of data paranoia. Just like I need tires on my car - i'm driving on literally marginal tires 2/32nds for dry and now we have winter and blizzards and I have to travel in a week. Unsafe. But fixing problem requires money. Everything is a balance and sometimes we make the wrong call or take the wrong gamble. :-/

That's why i've been planning my 'ultimate catastrophe-resistant backup system' for months as it is which is just waiting on finishing this semester, so that school loans in january (originally hoped for this fall but out of pocket uncovered medical... thanks for nothing Ob_m_c_re... sh_tcanned that plan) will hopefully let me fix my main PC (if it's a hardware failure), set up an entire backup PC, data migration/integrity strategy, and LTO/Ultrium tape writer for easy robust off-site redundant backups. I've got The Plan, it's just been hard to implement trying to take 25 credits of studies in one semester - I can't multitask that with being a sysadmin, that by itself is an endless job.


If my video is all intact and no other problems i'll post a followup once i'm done editing video at school. My crisis is semi-averted, not gone... i'd still like Windows to come back up again, to see if it's possible to salvage certain things from the inside. (yes I can access raw files from the hard drive, but that doesn't mean I can easily say pull saved passwords out of Firefox I might've forgot about and similar... or/and i'm not sure how to do that anyways... or/and even if someone tells me how to do that, what file to migrate, i'd still like to see if I could narrow down just WTF what-the-failure was from inside windows to learn from it if possible.)
 
Finished my video project (with 4 hours left til class, which I have to spend studying for final), thanks to anyone/everyone who offered or tried to offer help, whether I used it or not so far... because i'm still going to use it/try to get it back up under Windows to determine what went wrong, test things, look for orphan files/saved login data in browsers and such etc... I still need other data that I forget where it's stored on the PC the rest of this week, but my 24hr crisis over my video files is passed at least. :p