Crash, BSOD, Scannow running for 2 days

[Saturnine114]

My Dell Inspiron running Windows 10 crashed while playing the Sims last week. Gameplay before the crash was very sluggish. When attempting to reboot it got stuck on the Dell logo for awhile, then progressed to a black screen for several minutes before giving me the BSOD w/error message "Critical Process Died". It repeated this loop several times until I turned it off for the night. Next morning I turned it on and it appeared to go back to doing same thing so I left it. Came back a little while later to the Dell support assist screen saying no hardware issues found. Clicked continue and it immediately attempted auto repair which failed. After restarting and running auto repair again I could boot to safe mode. I bought an external hard drive to copy and paste my files just in case and that process took 3 days for all of them (Mostly photos). I then attempted to run scannow after reading that advice on others posts. It has been over 48 hours and the verification phase is at 67%. From what I understand this is unusually long. Any further direction would be appreciated.
*edit. After posting this and returning to my pc it had reached 70% and then said "Windows resource protection could not perform the requested operation" and restarted the scannow attempt on its own. It progressed quickly to 70% and then gave the same error message and did not attempt a 3rd time.

 

[Trouble]

Launch an elevated command prompt right click the Start Button (Windows Logo, bottom left of screen on taskbar) and select Command Prompt (Admin), and in the command prompt Windows type
chkdsk C: /R
hit enter and answer Yes “Y” when prompted and reboot.
This will likely take a long time depending on the size of the disk and to some extent its’ contents, do not interrupt it. When complete check the log file in Event Viewer for results (Right click the start button again and select Event Viewer from the context menu) expand Windows Logs and highlight / select Application, click Action on the menu bar and select Find and type chkdsk and hit enter. Check near the bottom of the report for anything indicating KBs in bad sectors.

 

[Saturnine114]

Thank you for getting back to me! I did as you suggested and it started the scan ok, took a few hours to get to 11%, stayed at 11% for a few hours and then it restarted the process, I wasn't watching it at that moment so I'm not sure if it gave any error message. It progressed to 11% again and then hung there again, I went to bed and when I woke and just checked on it, it is showing 4%. Should I still leave it alone or does it need intervention? Thanks

 

[Trouble]

It sounds to me like you have a bad drive.
The chkdsk utility in Windows 10 will often appear to stall at 11%. It's not.
The fact that it is re-checking might indicate that the disk cannot be marked as clean.
IF it were me.... I would remove the drive and attach it to another computer (if possible) and run chkdsk on that drive from within the other computer and see if the results were any different.
I would also attempt (at that time) to backup any critical files from that drive.

In the mean time you might want to consider, acquiring a new hard disk and installing Windows 10 on that.

 

[Saturnine114]

Sounds like you're right on the mark as it is "stuck" on 11% again. So in order for me to remove and test the drive, is there a safe way (maybe at this point safe is irrelevant) to interrupt the chkdsk process? Or am I looking at just doing a hard shut down?

 

[Trouble]

I'm relatively sure that, at this point, it's not going to make too much of a difference.
IF you want to wait and watch for the next chkdsk reboot, you should see a "press any key to cancel" to bypass the check disk utility, but.....
Once the "dirty bit" has been set and is not changed to "clean" it will prompt at every reboot.

I'm pretty sure that the drive is failing or minimally system files present on the drive are corrupt.
It may be that the drive has physical issues and is unrepairable but it still might be worth attaching it to a second computer to see if you can access any of your critical data.

 

[Saturnine114]

It took an unexpected turn and instead of repeating the scan this time it progressed back to the troubleshooting/advanced options screen. My files are backed up so I went ahead and attempted to start Windows normally and for the first time in over a week it did. I don't trust it though. I still think you're on track that hard drive is likely on its way out. If there are any diagnostics you think I should run now while things may be temporarily functional I'll certainly give them a go, thanks!

 

[Trouble]

You might want to check the hard disk manufacturer's website and see what they have for a proprietary diagnostic utility applicable to their drives.
WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostic utility http://support.wdc.com/downloads.aspx?lang=en
Seagate SeaTools http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/seatools/