A500-01x boot issues

My brother was using my toshiba last playing diablo 3, and after that I hadnt tried to boot it for awhile. Today I powered it on and it failed to boot to the harddrive. I tried a few times and on the third try windows booted normally but my computer seems to be running much more sluggish now. Does this mean that my harddrive is failing? I noticed before playing D3 that my graphic card temps were high and i had to shut down the computer when it got too high a few times. I kept a close eye on it but I believe my brother wasnt watching and maybe ran it too hot.. Im not turning it off now thats it running and am going to get an external hard drive to create a system image tomorrow. Any ideas on what the problem might be?

 

Check CPU, GPU and HDD temperatures with HWMonitor or similar. Check hard disk with HD Tune and try do a quick surface scan. Also, check hard disk health with CrystalDiskInfo. If the hard drive might be at fault, make sure that defragmentation is disabled and start backing up any important files.

 

Thanks for the advice! I appreciate it. Ill get onto it right now. If my harddrive is faulty do you think creating a system image onto an external USB harddrive would cause it to crash and die?

 

If the hard disk is dying, it would be better to try copy off any important files first. Trying to image the entire drive could be very slow.