Hi, I’m in a bit of a conundrum here and I thank you in advance for your help.
Basically I don’t know what is going on i.e. if I have malware or a broken hard drive.
The day before yesterday, my notebook (Lenovo, XP) was working fine. When I went to start it up yesterday, it did not boot properly. I tried a couple of times and eventually it worked. I tried to open my web-browser (Firefox) and it shut down and ran a Checkdisk. It detected something, fixed it and started back up again. Explorer worked, so I went ahead and saved all my data manually. Then I wanted to save my Firefox profile as well and the computer froze. I started it back up, tried again and the same thing happened. I then tried again file-by-file. The file freezing my system turned out to be “cookies sqlite”. I was able to copy all other files. But when I touched that one (and we’re talking copy and paste to an external HD) the machine froze. I tired the same thing through a Ubuntu live CD and again I was able to copy all of the profile except the cookies sqlite file. I tried doing an Acronis backup and there were some reading errors. I ran Lenovo’s PC doctor that said that there is a hard drive problem. I ran chkdisk from the command line and the computer froze during chkdsk. All this sounded like a HD-problem to me. I tried to see what on the computer was still working and it turned out that nearly everything was fine. I was able to start Opera and Thunderbird, burn DVDs etc. But when I tried Firefox again the computer crashed. In between all this (and I don’t exactly remember when) I suddenly had a pop-up message from Avast saying that a rootkit bug had been detected and that I should delete it (which I did) and to do a boot-scan, which I also did - and nothing was found. I then went ahead and hooked the machine up to the web, did an Avast definitions update and ran a full systems scan, during which the computer crashed with a “kernel_stack_inpage_error” message. I rebooted and ran other malware scans: Spybot, Malawarebytes and Superantispyware. Nothing was found except 2 tracking cookies (which is normal).
So, I would be really grateful if anyone could tell me where to go from here and whether this is a hard-drive problem or a bug. I have read that bugs can cause this type of behaviour but how am I to find out when I can run neither Avast nor Chkdsk ?
The hard drive is a Hitachi Travelstar which is about 3 years old.
Thanks a million !
Sydney
Hello, let’s first scan HDD to make sure it is damaged
Download MHDD utility from here:
MHDD download link
Unpack and burn as ISO …
Add and boot MHDD from disk ( in the same way as Live CD )
[*] When you load the file select option 1
[*] When the menu appears, select the disk that you’ll scan
Type in:
scan
…and hit enter
[*]In the next menu, click F4
[*]It will begin HDD scanning, let him to finish scan.
If there is more than 3 inputs in the district UNC X then your hard disk is damaged.
Hi TwinHeadedEagle, thanks so much for your post, that sort of tool was exactly what I needed 
And thanks also for the manual !!!
Just in case someone else has this sort of problem and needs to run the program: in my case it only worked once I put the HD into compatibility mode in Bios (instead of the pre-set AHCI).
My results are somewhat mixed and I would like to ask you for your comment please.:
I only have 2 X UNC problems and I know that you said 3 or more means the HD is broken. But what I noticed was that at the beginning of the scan there were only grey “spots” here and there in the graphic visualization (presumably those are some sort of faults ?). The amount of them increased during the scan though and towards the end, there were literally streaks of grey areas running down the screen (please see photo taken at the end of the scan). Surely, this can’t be good ? The other results were as follows:
<3ms: 3711730
<10ms: 114283
<50ms 4838
<150ms 86
(It’s a 500gb drive).
Currently, the drive is still running o.k. I was able to do a clean install of Windows 7 on it. So I am still not sure what caused the problems in the first place. Maybe it was the root virus that was found ? But what is more important for me now is the question if I should replace the hard drive or not. I would be happy to if those results mean that the drive is ending its life span. I’d rather opt for prevention now than for more problems later.
Thanks again so much for your help !
Sydney
Hi, my primary hard disk has one UNC error, for years, and it is still working good
So choice is up to you, HDD could remain at just two errors, but as well as, number of errors could start to increase. Monitor it’s behaving, and do not put important files on it.
Cheers
Cool ! Thanks so much