T41 hangs at startup

Hi everyone -

I've had my T41 for 3 years now, and it's been working great (1.80GHz/1GB RAM). For some reason last night it all of a sudden slowed down, and I went and did my ctrl/alt/del and forced Acrobat to quit. Then I turned off my computer. This morning, I got the computer to start up fine, and put in my password -- then my XP seems to be going and going, and would take nearly 15-20mn to get to the desktop screen. I can see everything on the desktop, but can't click on anything. None of the things in my taskbar is loading (excluding the time/date)

One of the things I did notice is that the time/date seems to update every 20-30mn, and the disk icon is just lit (but not flashing). I've tried the diagnostics -- the only thing I was able to do was to copy my files to an external HD. I tried the F8 to start in safe mode, but was unable to.

I've tried just leaving things on for an hour -- but the taskbar items still won't load and the whole computer just stalls. I am suspecting that the CPU load is too high, but am not sure. I know my disk still has plenty of space. What's bad is that my warranty (the extended one) just expired in December. I've had no problems until now.

Any thoughts on how I should approach this? Thank you in advance.

 

Can you run Chkdsk?

 

well here's what happened so far...

it took about 4 hours for the desktop to completely load. and i don't even have that many items in the taskbar. i saw that my norton360 has been "deactivated" -- even though it was always activated before.

then i looked into the processes and saw that there was an ibm process certtool.exe that was taking 99% of the cpu power, so i terminated that process and now the 99 is at system idle processes, which seems normal. even so, the system is still chuggin' along...

i tried to open "add/remove programs" but after 30mn it's still loading the "currently installed programs". i was going to see if removing norton360 would work.

the cpu usage meter is still very low (under 10%), but once in a while it will jump up into the 50s...

any more thoughts? thank you again!


** update **

i just saw that one of my partitions is missing... what should i do?

 

Sounds like there's two possibilities. A software issue or your drive is going. If you think it's a software issue you could try system restore or use AccessIBM to restore your machine since you were fortunate enough to get a backup. Otherwise if you have another drive laying around, you could try it.

 

thanks zaz -- i did try accessibm to restore files, and there is no slowdown whatsoever to get them. would that mean it's a software problem?

i did also run pc-doctor and it does say that there are certain sectors that could not be read because of bad addresses -- but doesn't give me an option to fix that...

any other thoughts? i really appreciate it!

 

Bad sectors = failing hard disk drive. Back up all data immediately, and replace the drive. You cannot truly "repair" bad sectors, the most you can do is have a program recover data from those sectors if possible, then mark them bad so that data is not saved to those areas.

That said, you still don't want to just mark them bad and go on your merry way. Bad sectors are like chicken pox: if you see one, you'll see more fairly soon, and Murphy will ensure your drive will fail just when you need your machine most, taking all of your data with it. Think of this as your chance to get a new, larger/faster hard disk.

 

Thank you LoneWolf - really appreciate it.

So it's easy to replace this? The thing is - the IBM accessibility thing is still working fast enough for me to get the files I wanted. I know that one of my partitions is gone... it's just too bizarre.

Do you know of a good data recovery program? I was thinking about copying the whole drive as much as possible to a usb hard drive.

Thank you again.

 

If you want a good drive-cloning program, Acronis TrueImage Home is inexpensive, and works wonders. I use the program myself, and am very happy with it.

Best thing to do would be to remove your original hard drive, and put it in an external USB enclosure. Install a new hard drive in your ThinkPad. Boot from your Acronis TrueImage CD (in normal mode, not Safe mode, for USB support) and clone the old drive to the new. One other option: Connect your ThinkPad to a network, boot from the TrueImage CD, and clone the drive to an image file on a shared folder you have access to on the network. Then install the new drive, and clone the image file to it. The home version of Acronis' software is capable of doing all of this.

During the process, you may get a notice that your source material has bad sectors. Tell it to ignore all errors and keep copying.

One note: At this point, if you hope to do this, you should stop using your system completely until you get that new hard disk. The more you use the old disk, the more likely the drive will go bad before you can make a successful clone of it.