Windows 8 Recovery Disk Really Slow

[Twoseventy]

I have a Toshiba P855 with a hard drive that is likely failing. Getting the winload.efi error, so Windows won't boot. Put in a recovery disk, but it takes a really, really long time for the Repair options to come up. Like 10 minutes. And the DVD isn't spinning, not much going on in the laptop. Running Diskpart and it took 5 minutes before I could type in sel disk. When I type list vol, the DVD volume info came right up, so that was encouraging, and... OK, the HD info did get listed, all healthy... which doesn't seem right to me. Anyway my question: is the performance of the recovery disk utilities dependent upon the hard drive health? Or am I maybe dealing with larger system wide issues? The laptop is pretty beat up and (you'll love this), the client took out the hard drive, OPENED THE CASE to see if he could detect a problem and put it back in, lol.

 

[popatim]

Yep it sounds like your hdd is failing alright and the client opening it up guaranteed its imminent complete failure. A spec of dust is like a boulder to the heads in an hdd. Remove the drive and boot with just the recovery disk in, see if performance returns to (somewhat) normal.

 

[Twoseventy]

Thanks, I'll try that out, put a timer on it too, and report back.

 

[Twoseventy]

Yeah, I think this drive is borked. Here's some other info I didn't share earlier.

A. When I tried to "refresh" the PC, not wipe out all the data, it told me the drive was locked. I googled some advice that indicated that maybe the hard drive wasn't the problem, UEFI settings and so forth, so I pressed on.

B. The "10 Minutes" for utilities to come up is the combination of time to get to the advanced troubleshooting screens, then... likely another 5 minutes for Command Prompt to come up

C. I tried "Resetting" the PC, wipe out all the data and start fresh. That's actually what I was in the middle of last night, got bored waiting for a prompt. It told me "Unable to reset your PC. A required drive partition is missing." This after Diskpart told me the 10GB recovery partition is Healthy (?).

Here are my stopwatch results, first withOUT the hard drive

1. Power on, watch Toshiba logo until I'm told to press a key to boot to DVD = 52 seconds

2. Press key, Toshiba logo again, until the Windows screen comes up asking for my region = 59 seconds

3. Click on Next, no wait. Then click on Repair Your Computer link, then options available = 3 seconds. Noting that there are only two options available: power off and troubleshoot. Reasonable since there's no hard drive

Results WITH compromised hard drive

1. :52 seconds, same
2. Total of 2:38. There's:59 seconds of Toshiba, then the screen goes dark for 1:39 until I get my region/next button option
3. 4:30 until I get troubleshooting options.
4. Advanced/Command Prompt (not available without HD): 2:28. So I wasn't far off at 9 minutes total, and it probably took a couple more minutes to get any data out of diskpart.

So Drive = Borked, IMHO

The reason I came calling here though, is that :52 and :59 seems like a really long time for me to be staring at a manufacturer splash screen. Is that normal for Toshiba? Or UEFI stuff in general is just that pokey? Thanks!