PC help needed

[Chel]

Hello. I got a new, personal computer back in November or December. It was a little old but it got the job done. Anyways, I turned it on yesterday and noticed it was acting like really slow. Things were taking like a minute to start, some things wouldn't even start at all, so I restarted the laptop as maybe that would help it. So I restart it right, and then I get something along the lines of this:

A disk read error has occurred. Press Ctrl Alt Del to restart

So I press those keys, and it would start up, reach the Acer screen (my computer is made by Acer), and just have a blank screen of black. Eventually I got something like: There was a problem with communicating with something, file: Windows.exe in location, and an error code. Apparently the computer can't access my hard drive or it isn't connected or something, even though my laptop was working just fine the day before. I hadn't installed any new programs or downloaded anything. 

Laptop: Acer Aspire TimelineX

OS: Windows 10, 64-bit

It has everything on it, my games, photos, videos, music, EVERYTHING. So does anyone know what is even going on, or how to fix it? 

I'm writing this on my school laptop, so at least I can still be on the forums. 

But if anyone knows anything about this problem, could you tell me what it is and/or how to fix it?

Edited April 2, 2019 by The_Cat_In_Space

[Chel]

Hoped for some help here but guess not

[Geonovast]

27 minutes ago, The_Cat_In_Space said:

Hoped for some help here but guess not

I know you're frustrated, but give it some time.  It's only been a few hours.

Based on the information you've provided, all we can really throw out there is some pretty vague guesses.

My guess is a bad harddrive.

First I would check and make sure your BIOS can even see the drive.  If it can't... chances are the disk is toast.  It could be the board, but I'd say it's far more likely that it is the drive.

If BIOS will see it, I would boot into some kind of live environment, like a lightweight Linux distro, and run a SMART test on the disk.

If that's all good, I would then use that to attempt to recover the data to a separate external drive, then re-install Windows.

I actually had a drive just up and die on me with zero warning a few days ago.  Luckily it was nothing critical and everything on it was backed up, but it sucks.  No indications.  No questionable boots.  Just suddenly the computer stopped responding, and the BIOS wouldn't even see that a drive was plugged in.

[IncongruousGoat]

16 minutes ago, Geonovast said:

If BIOS will see it, I would boot into some kind of live environment, like a lightweight Linux distro, and run a SMART test on the disk.

@The_Cat_In_Space To expand on this, since it might not be obvious to someone who isn't a veteran Linux user:

What Geonovast is suggesting is installing what's called a "live image" of a Linux distribution (Ubuntu or Mint are probably the best choices in this case) onto a flash drive (Ubuntu should provide instructions for how to do this), and booting your computer off of that by selecting your flash drive as the boot disk in the BIOS. Since the operating system you're booting is running entirely off of this flash drive it'll be slow, but it will boot and work regardless of what condition your hard drive is in. Once you've booted into your live environment, you can use it to check what condition the disk is in using various tools.

[steve_v]

7 hours ago, The_Cat_In_Space said:

A disk read error has occurred.

This is why we have backups.

See if the BIOS detects the drive.
Open machine, reseat HDD cables. Check for and correct any corrosion on drive electronics. (been there so I'll throw it in, but that was a pretty hostile environment).
See if the BIOS detects the drive.
If the drive is not detected by BIOS, try it in another machine. If that also fails to detect the drive, it's probably beyond (DIY) recovery. Replace drive and restore data from backup.

If the drive is detected, boot a live environment such as PartedMagic* (an old but usable version is included with Ultimate Boot CD) or SystemRescueCD from USB / CDROM and use smartctl/gsmartctl to retrieve self-test and health data from the drive.
At this point it is advisable to image the drive (or at least important data) before proceeding further, the sooner this is done on a failing drive the greater the chances of getting your data off. The live distros above have several tools for this, I like ddrescue. Any GNU/Linux distro will do in a pinch though, as they will all have dd.
Once you have the data off the drive, decide with the help of the SMART data, SMART self-test routines, and potentially results of a badblocks run whether the drive is still usable.

*Not free but very handy to have around, the best recovery distro I have seen. I can flick you a recent-ish copy if you can't spring the $11, or you can just look in the usual places.

 

7 hours ago, The_Cat_In_Space said:

It has everything on it

If by that you mean that single drive contains the only copy of your data, you have just learned a valuable lesson. There are two kinds of computer users: those who have backups, and those who have never experienced a disk failure.

 

2 hours ago, Geonovast said:

I actually had a drive just up and die on me with zero warning a few days ago.

It happens, and it's happened to me many times. My record is 12TiB of (non-critical but very annoying to restore) data going poof when 2 drives failed within hours of each other. Now I run more redundancy.

 

1 hour ago, IncongruousGoat said:

Ubuntu or Mint are probably the best choices in this case

I heartily disagree. A distro designed for data recovery is almost certainly a better choice as it will have the tools you need preinstalled and readily accessible.

 

[Chel]

I booted it up just like 30 mins ago. It loaded windows, but then got a black screen for 10 minutes, then loaded the desktop (which is blank but has my background showing). So it's kinda recovering, just slowly.

[steve_v]

1 minute ago, The_Cat_In_Space said:

So it's kinda recovering, just slowly.

Run a filesystem check.
And back up your data regardless. Failing hard drives do not magically get better - they can remap some percentage of sectors to cover for failing media, but any read error or data-loss is cause to be very suspicious of future reliability.

[Chel]

Okay, how do I back all of it up? 

[steve_v]

1 minute ago, The_Cat_In_Space said:

how do I back all of it up? 

In the simplest sense, copy everything to another (external as this is a laptop) drive. This will do for your personal files, but it does nothing to aid quickly restoring the system and installed software.

Windows had a proper backup tool, but for some idiotic reason Microshaft decided to deprecate it. I think it's still available in 10 via: Control Panel - >System and Security -> Backup and Restore (Windows 7).
It would do for now, but as MS has thrown their users to the wolves (i.e. third-party software providers), it's left as an exercise for the reader to find a replacement for windows backup before they remove it completely.

Other options for imaging the complete system or copying to a new drive include using Macrium Reflect from within windows (there are others, but I'm not going into the cesspit of sort-of-free-but-not windows software to list them), or booting one of the aforementioned live GNU/Linux systems and using one of the many free tools therein, such as Clonezilla (my pick), ntfsclone, G4L, or plain-old dd .
Imaging the drive this way will make a full copy of everything that can be restored to a new drive if the one you have decides to crap the bed completely, Windows and all your software included. If you're even slightly lazy, you want that.

If you want something automatic (so you don't need to remember to re-do the image or copy over new files regularly), it's time to go in search of reviews of third-party solutions. People who actually use windows might chime in here with their picks, hint hint.

[IncongruousGoat]

9 hours ago, steve_v said:

I heartily disagree. A distro designed for data recovery is almost certainly a better choice as it will have the tools you need preinstalled and readily accessible.

You're probably right; I was making my recommendations only on a heuristic of ease of use of distro.

[Chel]

@steve_v So you're saying this was kind of an indication that the laptop is starting to fail and that I should back up everything? I'll do it all tonight, went out and got an external HD last night

[steve_v]

29 minutes ago, The_Cat_In_Space said:

@steve_v So you're saying this was kind of an indication that the laptop is starting to fail and that I should back up everything?

Your problems may or may not be a sign of impending failure, looking at the SMART data for the drive (try Crystal Disk Info on windows) would be the place to start in making an educated guess.
You should back up regardless, hard drives can and do fail without warning.

[LordFerret]

I had a desktop pc going through some major funkiness a while back, which I initially thought was the HD failing;  Turns out it was the CD drive had fried.  Once I pulled the drive, all became well again.