Strange boot problem with laptop.

Liquid_funk

Liquid_funk

Liquid_funk

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30 Jan 2018
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Hello everyone, thanks for taking the time to check my thread.

My laptop has been having a strange problem. I run windows 7 from a Kingston SSD and have a separate 750gb Scorpio black hdd which only has university work, a few games and fl studio.

When I enter my password at the welcome screen the screen will remain black and only the mouse cursor will move. Sometimes after 30+ minutes it will finally load the desktop and everything works as usual. Sometimes I have to do a hard restart until eventually it will load the desktop.

I've run a diagnostic tool on my SSD and it said it has 98% health. Windows is the only thing on the drive.

Naturally my next thought was that windows was failing so I was about to reinstall windows 10 from a USB however I first took out my Scorpio black. To my surprise the laptop loaded straight up onto the desktop after I put my password in. This was not a fluke as I restarted and shutdown the laptop several more times and each time it loaded perfectly without the Scorpio. As soon as I insert the Scorpio back in the laptop is back to its usual tricks of waiting 30+ minutes to load the desktop. Clearly this suggests that the problem lies with the Scorpio black.

The data I had on the Scorpio has been backed up luckily but is there any way of reformatting the Scorpio black without having to get it to boot from startup?

Or if anyone has alternative suggestions or potential fixes I'd welcome them. Thanks for your time!
 
Welcome to the forum.

Open Disk Management, and have a look to see that the Scorpio is only described as "Healthy (Primary Partition)". If it has any other description like Active or Boot there could be some parts of Windows on it, which can cause the issue you're experiencing.

On a separate note, you could connect the Scorpio to a PC through hot-plugging so it doesn't have to boot along with the rest of the system. Read up about this, usually the setting for a SATA port in the motherboard BIOS needs to be changed to hot-plug option, before actually doing it. The result is like connecting a USB external drive. And it can then be formatted. There may be better ways or alternatives that storage gurus could suggest.
 
Hi Danny, thanks for your reply.

I'm not currently able to boot it with the Scorpio inserted. I've just ordered a SATA to USB cable to try and access the drive that way. If this is unsuccessful I will try what you suggested with hot-plugging. Currently by just using the SSD I'm able to use Word, use the internet and do all the basic tasks I need to which is a relief.
 
Can you ctrl, shift and tab to bring up the task manager?

If so go file - new task - explorer.exe and see if it loads the desktop then.
 
Hi Simon, thanks for your reply. Unfortunately I am unable to do anything in the black screen other than move the mouse cursor.

To update the problem: I have purchased a USB to SATA cable and connected the Scorpio to my laptop using this. However despite the drive showing up under the 'My Computer' tab, when I right click it or try to access the drive, the egg timer appears and explorer freezes until the drive is unplugged. I've also tried running a chkdsk command on the drive while it's been plugged in via USB however that seems unresponsive.

If this means the drive is beyond saving then fair enough, although there were a few files I would have like to have recovered I got the really important things off.
 
That's a shame.
The only other thing that I know of is you could try a live linux cd/usb and see if you can mount the scorpio drive that way.

I think I used erd commander years ago to backup someones drive that was on the way out, managed to copy all the photos before the drive gave up completely failed.
Pretty sure that was on Windows XP lol so I'm no expert on this.
 
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