scbs29 wrote:
On Fri, 20 Jul 2018 13:03:43 +0100, scbs29
wrote:

Hello all
Literally between switching off at night and restarting next morning I
started having problems booting up. It can take anything up to 5
or 6 tries before I succeed. This has been going on for 4 days.
There have been no changes to software or hardware for at least
3 months.

The problems can be any of :
1. Boot splash screen appears and the pc hangs. Need to switch off
power.

snip

Windows 7 disk and try Repair installation ?
Should I seek professional advice ?

Packard Bell iXtreme X6620 UK
Intel Core 2 Quad Q8300 @ 2.5GHz
6 GBytes DDR2 RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti, 2Gb RAM
Windows 7 Pro, 64-bit
MoBo Packard Bell EG43M
Direct X 11

TIA

Thanks once again for all of the advice and help.
When I got my pc up and running, out of curiosity I ran a frag
analysis (Auslogics) on my E: drive. The results showed a block of
about 250Gb containing 3 files which were completely fragmented.
These were old system backups, but I didnt think they took up that
much space.
I then ran the defrag on the disk and nothing happened, the block was
not defragged although the rest of the disk was.
I deleted the folder containing these 3 files and since then, apart
from the disk not showing up in File Manager which sorted itself out
on the next reboot, I have had no problems at all.
I realise that it is only a week since I did this, so it is still
early days, but possibly these files were the root of the problem ?
I carried out Seagate and HDSentinel tests on the drive and there
were no problems found.


You still have the SMART data to look at in HDTune.
To see if the drive is actually healthy.

At the very least, you should do a full backup of the disk.
You cannot store this on the disk itself, but place it on
some other, more reliable disk drive. That is your insurance
in case more problems now manifest themselves.

I doubt it has anything to do with the files directly.
But opening up that space, may have resulted in some
defragmented files moving to the space you've opened
up, a space with fewer storage problems or something.

Paul