Hard drive won’t boot

Oct 23, 2018
3
0
10
My pc was showed up with an error when booting and said to press crtl alt delete so I did so it restarted and worked fine then the same thing happen the next day but this time the boot took 5 hours and was so slow I couldn’t even get the windows button to work so I ended up restarting and it gave me the windows has run into a problem blue screen so then I tried formatting the drive which it came up with an error saying failure to format drive or something like that so then I looked at the drive again and it showed it as wiped so I just started installing windows on the drive and it stayed at 0% for 5 hours so I restarted and tried again and it still hasnt worked I’ve tried going to cmd and selecting the drive and cleaning it but when I hit enter it just freezes and stays there for like 4 hours I did install some potentially infected files 2 weeks ago and ignored them but normally those don’t lead to stuff like this the drive is 1 tb and I’ve had it for 2 years
 
Solution
I am assuming you have a Windows 10 install disk that you are booting from?
If so, with the drive in the PC, and booting from the Windows 10 installer, you should get to the screen where you see partitions where it asks where you want to install Windows. Select each one and delete them until you have a single partition showing as unallocated space. Click next and let Windows do it's thing and it will create any partitions it needs and install Windows. No virus will survive this process.

If this doesn't work then you probably have a bad drive, download Seatools for DOS and make a CD or USB drive to boot from and run their short and long tests. Any errors means it is failing. Alternately pull the drive and attach to another Windows PC...

BadAsAl

Distinguished
I am assuming you have a Windows 10 install disk that you are booting from?
If so, with the drive in the PC, and booting from the Windows 10 installer, you should get to the screen where you see partitions where it asks where you want to install Windows. Select each one and delete them until you have a single partition showing as unallocated space. Click next and let Windows do it's thing and it will create any partitions it needs and install Windows. No virus will survive this process.

If this doesn't work then you probably have a bad drive, download Seatools for DOS and make a CD or USB drive to boot from and run their short and long tests. Any errors means it is failing. Alternately pull the drive and attach to another Windows PC and install Seatools for Windows and run the tests that way.

 
Solution

ikaz

Distinguished
Dec 27, 2005
110
0
18,660
So wait is this boot drive for Windows ? do you have another PC that could connect the drive too and try to do do a format ? As you stated generally speaking Virus won't disable the operation of a drive. You should be able to format however if the drive is failing you see some of the issues your describing. Now the question is how much is your time worth, a 1TB drive cost between $40 and $50 US. So it maybe worth to purchase a new HD and buy a cheap HD enclosure for around $5-10 and use try to use your "old" drive as external storage/backup drive assuming your able to format it in a new system.
 

seagate_surfer

Prominent
Mar 31, 2017
16
0
590


Have you tired the steps others have suggested including myself? You can get SeaTools from here.