A friend of mine had been battling odd computer crashes, Internet disconnects, and extremely slow loading of programs. It had been going on for a long time and getting worse. It was so bad he couldn’t burn Windows to a disk, had no recovery disk, and no way of getting the iso off his raid anyway. We tried everything thinking it might be a memory issue, malware, bad drivers, etc.
Well, last night we finally fixed the damn thing. It took forever, like 10 hours. It took 5 minutes sometimes just for his browser to open. Then downloading a utility took another 5 and installing could take up to 10. Anyway, it turned out to be a bad hard drive that was slowly dying and on its very last legs.
After a long time we were able to finally clone his partitions to a secondary hard drive, reinstall the system reserved partition and repaired the bcd. It really wouldn’t have taken much time if things were working as they should but the bad state of the drive made everything take ages.
It’s a good feeling finally knowing what was wrong and fixing it. Victory!