cynde

Thank you very much for your help and patience. I gave up and replaced the hard drive. That's a first for me. I was surprised by how easy it was.

Hi, I managed to pull everything important off of it (took days) but still haven't made it to the tutorial. will do it asap

I'll try this in the next day or so and get back to you. busy days ahead. I'm doing to save as much as I can off of it first. thanks

what do the errors mean, and are they fixable?

still creepy slow, disk at 100%. It took me ages just to get the info onto the thumb drive. click folder, wait 3 minutes, click something in the folder, wait 10 minutes, Microsoft management console not responding... Most frustrating

it finished around midnight! it took me 3 hours this morning to finish the steps and put it on a thumb drive! Thanks winint.txt

check disk commenced okay but has been stuck at 11% for at least 2 hours. I'll leave it overnight

i didn't see it

I assume that it ran on the restart I mentioned in comment #32

even though I have nothing running except the task manager it is humming away, stops for awhile and starts again

I noticed in the evntvwr - windows logs - Application, (before "filter current log) there was dozens of entries today, and some warnings. I dont know if that means anything but... thanks

I guess that doesnt get you what you needed. there are no wininit logs'

then "chkdsk cannot run because the volume is in use by another process. Would you like to schedule this volume to be checked the next time the system restarts? <Y/N>" I typed Y and restarted

finally got to the CMD as admin but "This type of file system is NTFS Cannot lock current drive"

tried it, got this message access denied as you do not have sufficient privileges You have to invoke this utility running in an elevated mode So I tried to search CMD from the start menu to run it as admin, several times. It timed out, saying that something went wrong...taking too long... search again?"