Windows 10: Help solve a mystery: cause of drive errors / corrupt system files

Happy to start of this post by saying, I performed a factory reset on my machine and it is up and running. Though my computer is thankfully functional again, I'm not sure what went wrong in the first place... so I'm posting generally, soliciting advice from anyone who feels like telling me what not to do with this fresh start. The description is quite long... but the week of trying to fix this on my own has been longer. I have a few questions that I haven't found answers for online, and a bit of mystery where I don't even know where to start with questions.

The machine came to me a month ago, new.. the person who brought it had installed Office on it, even though Office was already on it.. so I had two copies of things, signed into two Microsoft accounts. I set up my Google accounts, private and for work, and got right back to work using Google Drive for creation/collaboration and Webex or Zoom for meetings, with a Webex extension on Chrome and "work offline" enabled for Drive. There was sometimes high disk-usage from Windows services, as has been an issue with previous computers, and I would go and do things like disabling Superfetch or Windows Search, following advice from various forums. I wonder if that is a mistake, disabling things... will disk usage automatically stabilize if I just wait a bit?

After a month, the pre-loaded McAfee free trial was ready to expire.. I didn't purchase McAfee on other computers, and had wondered if I was being irresponsible. So I went ahead and purchased, downloaded, and used McAfee to clean the machine, including my temporary files. I don't know if it was completely unrelated, or due to the presence of the new McAfee install, or due to whatever I cleaned out... but pretty quickly my disk-use was spiking like mad whenever I woke the computer up or opened Chrome, or whenever McAfee decided to do something. The most demanding items were now things like Service Host Local System, Windows Update, McAfee, and Chrome. (Sidenote: Around that time I also tried to open Skype for the first time, but the program had no icon and didn’t give any response to attempts to open or uninstall, as was recommended in online searches.)

Following advice for fixes of Windows Update disk usage, I saw Security and Maintenance had reported drive errors and suggested restart... so i restarted. Repair hung at 10% for hours, so I researched what to do. Restarted again and skipped repairs, as suggested. Attempted to restore health from command prompt. Command prompt cited error 1392, saying the directory in the temporary folder "C:\Users\(name)\Appdata\Local Temp" could not be created. I tried to check and see if the file was there and if I had access but it was just too much I was unfamiliar with... I wonder if it was an administrator access thing, as I had changed the login password. Do I need to go and change the admin password too if I change the user password? Was that keeping my system from self-repairing?

I researched what to do from there. Attempted to perform a scan from safeboot, and safeboot failed, saying “file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.” I researched what to do from there. Tried creating a new user account, it said “The user profile service failed the login, User profile cannot be loaded.” Researched what to do and started seeing the suggestions about system recovery and reset.

I had task manager open constantly through all of this, monitoring how it changed according to what I was doing. I wonder if that was harmful.

Tried just restarting it, it said Task Manager was preventing shutdown, though I was sure I had closed everything. I clicked cancel but it restarted anyway, said it had a problem and had to restart, referred to NTFS File System, said to go to windows.com/stopcode, which wasn’t informative at all. The computer went into preparing automatic repair, hung there an hour.

I researched what to do from there- forced reboot, hit Escape to do a system recovery, but since I didn’t set it up beforehand it didn’t work… found out that past 2018 Windows10 doesn’t come automatically with system recovery. Tried troubleshooting startup problems, it said it’s repairing errors… then restarted, went just to the spinning dots without words, and then nothing, just a black lit screen and a gentle vibration. Let it sit an hour, nothing changed. I shut it off. Researched what to do... Turned it on, went into system recovery, and did a system reset, keeping my files.

After reinstalling, it came to the login screen with tons of dots on the admin password for a split second, didn't wait for me to do anything, and told me the administrator’s password was incorrect. While I Googled what to do, the login for the administrator disappeared and I just used the usual user to login. I logged in. It hung at login for awhile, then screen went black with the circling dots.

At this point I started imagining giving up online work and becoming a rice farmer with my mother-in-law.

I googled what to do for the computer and found nothing. Gave it an hour, shut it down, turned it on, went into recovery and did a complete wipe-clean reset like people do before selling their machine. After that it went all the way to requesting location and language info, before giving me the screen that says “Why did my PC restart? There’s a problem that’s keeping us from getting your PC ready to use, but we think an update will help get things working again.” I connected to the internet, hit next to install update, and it went to a blue screen for a long time saying “Just a moment” with the spinning dots... it blinked once, came back on.. And eventually restarted again, and did all of that again, minus connecting to WiFi… tried it again, and was back with the “Why did my PC restart?” screen… hitting next… back to "Just a Moment".. I tried changing wifi devices and it was the same. I researched what to do for the update-restart loop, it recommended changing boot sequence settings in UEFI, or something like that.

Uncomfortable with that, I snooped around more in the recovery section... took this path: ESC, F11, Troubleshoot, recovery manager, system recovery for original factory condition. Somehow that was different from the system resets I had done. I looked it up, it looked okay, and I did it. It worked, thank goodness. I don't know why it worked when nothing else did, but I'm thankful.

So here I am, starting again.

As soon as I got it set up I created a recovery point. I noticed while exploring that section that it doesn't see my account as the administrator.. I guess it's like an elevated account I can get to through my own, I don't know why it was saying the administrator password was incorrect after that first "keep my files" reset. I wonder if that has something to do with anything, and if there's anything I can do to make sure access exists where it should.

I went ahead and downloaded McAfee from the license I paid for... the opinions online are conflicting but McAfee and Microsoft seem pretty confident in their capability. I noticed after buying it previously that it had automatically turned off Windows Defender, so I don't think they were getting in each other's way. Something notable is that this time there was a process for removing the trial version of McAfee and restarting the computer.. That might have been part of the installation last week but I have forgotten.

I still have the 100% disk usage from system, audioswitch, mcafee scanner service, superfetch, delivery optimization... other service hosts. Haven't downloaded Chrome yet. Most of the time disk use spikes it's right after McAfee gets up to something. Idk if I need to take off McAfee and burn what I paid for it, or if it's worth it for the protection.

I am lost as to what I did to the poor thing, and I don't want to do it again. I used to ask my friends for help but am now working very remotely in a place where I have yet to meet a computer repair person I would trust with my machine. I've got to get to where I can care for my devices on my own. Any advice from anyone who read this - if you have any ideas where I went wrong, besides getting married in the rainforest, please share.

:)

 

Corrupted file RAR

If the archive has been created using WinRAR, why don't you try WinRAR itself? It has a built-in repair feature for repairing corrupted archive (ZIP as well as RAR). Follow the steps given below:

• Open WinRAR application in your system.
• Now click on File tab > Open or simply press Ctrl+O.
• A small window "Find Archive" will pop up. Locate the corrupt RAR archive from your system directory and select it.
• Now click Open button.
• Click Tools tab > Repair archive or simply press Alt+R.
• Again a small window "Repairing File name.rar" will pop up.
• Now click Browse to select a location to save the repaired archive.
• Check the box "Treat the corrupt archive as RAR" and click OK.
• WinRAR will start repairing of corrupt RAR archive. Once it gets completed click Close.

I hope the above steps will help you repair the corrupted RAR archive.

Thanks.

 

CANNOT DELETE A CORRUPTED FILE ON MY EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE ON WINDOWS 10

Hi Leenus,

Hard drive and other external memory storage can be corrupted on account of bad sectors which are no longer accessible or writable due to permanent damage. Your device or hard drive could also be infected by some type of malware. These are some of the possible
causes why you are experiencing the error "ERROR 0x80070570: The file or directory is corrupted or unreadable". To address this concern, we suggest performing the following troubleshooting methods:

Method 1

Check and repair disk errors or corrupted file system. This process can fix "The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable" error caused by bad sectors, virus infection or file system corruption. To do so, follow these steps:

• Back up all of the files on the hard drive (except for the corrupted file).
• Using Search, type CMD.
• From the search results, right-click on Command Prompt and then choose Run as administrator.
• On the Command Prompt window, type chkdsk /f h: (h stands for your hard drive) and then hit the Enter key.
• Delete the corrupted file and check if you'll experience the same error.

Method 2

Format the hard drive. You can manually format the hard drive to permanently remove "The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable" error. These are the steps on how to format an external drive:

• Plug the hard drive into your computer.
• Back up all of the files on the hard drive (except for the corrupted file).
• Open File Explorer and then click This PC.
• Click the external hard drive's name, click on Manage tab and then click on Format.
  
• Click Start and then click OK.

Keep us updated with the result.

 

CANNOT DELETE A CORRUPTED FILE ON MY EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE ON WINDOWS 10

I had the very same problem and this worked perfectly!!!