ThinkPad T430 Freezes - Disk Failure or Virus

[tjeckley]

I have had this laptop for about 6 months - I got it from work and I think it is about two years old. It will work perfectly fine for days and then start freezing. If I am in outlook for example, it locks, the screen fades color and I just have to wait or reboot. In the last few days it has become unusable and when rebooted I get the message "Windows detected a hard disk problem" - in researching this, some think this pop-up message is the result of a virus and no errors are reported in chkdsk or in the windows status screens for that drive - sandisk SSD U100. I have been scanning with MalwareBytes and Spybot but I am wondering if the locking/freezing sounds more like a virus or a failing drive. Thanks all! (Running windows 8.1)

[TylerD75]

Try out this toolkit, and see if you can get some SMART info from your disk.

I've never experienced those kind of issues with any of my SSD disks, but I have with "normal" drives. So although I wouldn't exclude a virus being the issue, I would further explore disk-failure first.

If your SSD is only 6 months old, it would be strange to see those issues so soon. But the SSD decay could be speeded up by i.e. virus activity (lots of writes/deletes to/from an SSD drive). But I would check if there are any firmware upgrades for your drive first.

Tools like chkdsk can really only tell you if anything is wrong with the filesystem, and not hardware.

Hope this helps...

Cheers
Martin

PS: I found this link to someone with similar issues with Sandisk U100. Is this a hybrid drive? Or is the U100 only used as a cache drive? What size is it? If it's only used as a cache it could be another disk being the real problem...

[Deep Modi]

Oh, In this case I always do one thing,
I just reboot my pc and run in SAFE mode, and just get to startup process and disable all programs (except microsoft)
and check the program files as well as windows (fully)
if I find any folder which is not related to my program or windows.
I Just Delete it....

and starting in normal mode stop this issue,

And as For the msg thats may not be Virus, it may be Malware, (This may be unable to detect if the malware is running in differnt way and also if this is new malware for your malware scanner)

and can you please tell me some more so that I can get it

[tjeckley]

Thanks for the help. I actually came across that article as well. I ran the toolkit and the overall status was "Fail". I'm having trouble exporting the data since the PC keeps freezing but a lot of "N/A" entries in the status - does this mean failing or just unable to detect? I am assuming this is a cache drive at 16 GB but the windows error does specify this drive.

[TylerD75]

Not all SMART tags are present/valid in all drives, so some "N/A" entries should/could be expected (not the same as failed).

But from what I understand from the thread I linked to, you could try removing (or disable in BIOS) the SSD drive to see if it works without it (if it's being used as a cache drive). This could slow your system down, but if the problem persists it's most probably not your SSD that is the problem.

Martin

[tjeckley]

Hi Martin - that is exactly what I am working on now. I just pulled it out of the laptop and did not get the error message on boot. I'll work with it for a while and see what happens and let you know!

[tjeckley]

So far my Laptop seems to be working just fine with the cache drive removed. I guess I can try to contact Lenovo for a replacement or just leave as is. Thanks again for the help.

[TylerD75]

No problemo! Glad your laptop is feeling better ;)

[tjeckley]

So unfortunately, while my laptop functioned well for a couple of days after removing the SSD cache drive, it is now back to some old tricks. I tried system restore but still having problems. Not as bad as it was before I removed the SSD which was unusable, but back to problems I have had intermittently. I will just hang in any program, excel, browser, outlook, office, and I just h ave to wait for it to clear itself. Sometimes I cannot get a program to open or it is just very slow. I'm thinking I may have to move this thread over to another section but not sure which. Any on what the issues could be? I'm thinking maybe some sort of conflictwith win8.

[TylerD75]

I don't use Windows 8 (yet), but I'm a Windows 7 user, so I'm not sure if this applies to you...

When I installed an SSD drive in my Windows 7 computer, I was told to disable the Superfetch service (see status in services.msc). Once you remove an SSD I guess you should start this service again.
This might not be relevant, as you computer should handle this automagically, and using a cache drive might not be the same as "using SSD" in this case.

But it would be interesting to see what happens if you insert a new cache drive (if you get one back from Lenovo).
I'm guessing you did the SMART test on the remaining drive too?
What does the CPU usage look like when it hangs? (Is it extensive CPU usage that hangs the computer? Or is it i.e. the remaining disk that causes it?)
I would also check your event logs to get some insight into what might be causing this, and why.

[tjeckley]

Hi Tyler,

I again have been working with my laptop since my last posting a few days ago and it has been working very well, only AFTER I disabled all the startup services. My intention was to start adding the services back to see which one may be a culprit in the hanging but not sure if I should even bother. So far it doesn't seem like I am missing anything! ;-) I did order a replacement upgrade cache from Crucial/amazon rather than go through Lenovo but I have yet to install that. Thanks for the info regarding the SuperFetch service - will check if that applies here. I may be posting further with questions on setting up the cache but if so I suppose I can move that over to a different thread.

[RobertHDD]

your SSD or HDD sounds like its about to go.