Black Screen After Login but Removing Secondary HDD Fixes the Problem

[Jesse Savary]

I have two hard drives in my computer, a 64GB ADATA SSD that I use as a boot drive and program drive, and a 1.5TB WD that I use for general storage (documents, pictures, videos, etc).

Last night I shut down my computer and when I turned it on this morning I noticed that my login was incredibly slow. After entering my password the 'Welcome' text did not display for about two minutes. When it did display, it took a few more minutes to get past it. When that happened I was presented with a black screen and only my mouse pointer. I could press Ctrl + Alt + Del but clicking anything got me know where (it would lock up and I'd have to reboot).

I managed to do the Shift + Restart trick to get myself into safe mode but I was not able to fix the problem. Safe Mode looked like my computer normally does but it was incredibly slow and every program (including Windows Explorer and Task Manager) would lock up and crash, similar to the Ctrl + Alt + Del menu on normal boot.

I then used another Windows 8 computer I own to create a recovery USB stick. I tried performing a refresh but I could not because the drive was "locked". I Googled around to find a fix for the locking issue and had to use the stick's command prompt to enter in some commands. None of the commands resolved the locking issue but I did discover that the storage drive was being mounted as C and the boot drive as D. This is the opposite of what they normally are. The storage drive also had some errors that chkdisk found but it was unable to fix them (it locked up and froze completely around the 68% mark).

I then unplugged the storage drive and tried booting. Windows 8 logged in fast and my computer was like it was last night, except for not having the storage drive. I would like to know how I can fix this because I absolutely need that drive working. I can provide any information that is needed, thank you.

 

[Shostakovich Teddy]

Do your motherboard support hot plug? If the answer is yes, you can plug in your data drive WHILE you are using computer (I mean when you successfully boot into windows and login). It will show the data drive in explorer. I suggest you copy all your important data on that drive to another storage so you can completely format it. I think format the drive will fix the problem. And then you can try boot your pc with pluging in both drive and see if it solves the problem

 

[Jesse Savary]

Yeah I ended up doing something similar, here are the steps to fix this in case you run into a similar problem.

1. Unplug the power + SATA cable from secondary drive
2. Boot into Windows
3. Plug the secondary drive in (apparently you should use a different power cable than the one powering the primary)
4. Give Windows a minute to recognize the drive
5. Press the Windows key and type 'cmd', right click the 'cmd.exe' entry and select 'Run as Adminstrator'
6. Type 'chkdisk DRIVE_LETTER /F', replacing DRIVE_LETTER with the letter of the secondary drive (i.e. D, E, etc)
7. Give it some time, my drive is fairly huge and took around an hour
8. Reboot your PC

It's worth noting that I'm using a UEFI motherboard with Windows installed in UEFI mode. I also have ACHI mode enabled for my SATA drives (motherboard setting). I do not know if these steps will work without UEFI + ACHI.

One more thing is that I had to set the SATA port that the secondary would connect to as 'external'. I did this from my motherboard settings. Without the port set as external, hot plugging did not work.

I don't really know what caused this issue but it was errors / corruption on the secondary drive. I think this stopped Windows from functioning normally because a few system things (such as the paging file and search index) run off of the secondary.