BleepingComputer.com: My mother's laptop might be dying... help!

When I first registered here, it was to thank you for your rogueware removal tutorials that (indirectly) got XP Antispiware off my computer. Now, I think my mother's Vista Home Premium? laptop is going to eat it soon.

-Beginning several months ago, the fans started rumbling and clattering. We agreed they might be full of dust, but she never got around to checking.

-Yesterday it started going really slow, and actually froze, neccesitating a restart of Explorer, while trying to do something that's usually pretty innocuous as far as resource requirements go. She had a lot of things open, but she usually does. Task manager said CPU usage was hovering around 45-75% at that point.

-Last night it gave her a STOP error (BSOD) that disappeared before she could tell me what it said.

-Also last night, she ran MBAM in safe mode and it came up completely clean.

-This morning, she tried to boot in safe mode, but it booted in normal mode and then rebooted itself.

-When it rebooted, it ran a check-disk and said it was fixing corrupted files. But when it got to the end and made the report, it listed 0 of the first thing, 0 of the second thing, and 4 of the third thing (she doesn't remember what they were).

-Once or twice after reaching the desktop, it tried to reboot itself but instead went to a BSOD which said it was doing a "physical dump".

-She also tried once more to run it in safe mode. It said it was loading the drivers and such, then it froze when it got to CDC something.

-Now she's run some sort of memory scan and it was frozen for the longest time on 10% overall (21% of first pass). It did move on after a while.

-She wrote down a couple of error messages she saw. These appeared at two different times, and they may contain small inaccuracies because I can't read her handwriting all that well.

-The first one says:

The file or directory c:\$secure is corrupt and unreadable
Please run the chkdsk utility

-The second one said:

mpnotify.exe - Bad image
C:\Windows\System32\BCMLogon.dll is either not designed to run on windows or it contains an error. Try installing the program again using the original installation media or contact your sys admin (or the person who sold the software, she can't remember what it said after that).

Then it hung.

Can anyone tell me what's going on here?

This post has been edited by RustyComputer: 22 March 2011 - 05:45 PM

Quote

Was it rather crcdisk.sys?

If so, it may indicate hard drive issue.

Run hard drive diagnostics: http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=287 (or http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=28744&hl=hard+drive+diagnostic)
Make sure, you select tool, which is appropriate for the brand of your hard drive.
Depending on the program, it'll create bootable floppy, or bootable CD.
If downloaded file is of .iso type, use ImgBurn: http://www.imgburn.com/ to burn .iso file to a CD (select "Write image file to disc" option), to make the CD bootable.
For Toshiba hard drives, see here: http://sdd.toshiba.com/main.aspx?Path=ServicesSupport/FujitsuDrivesUSandCanada/SoftwareUtilities#diagnostic

Note : If you do not know how to set your computer to boot from CD follow the steps HERE

I just asked her and yes, it was cdcdisk. Now it's saying something about a hard drive error too.

Great... just listened to that "click of death" video and though I could barely hear it, it was a bit like the sound the computer has been making for months now. And here we thought it was the fans *multiple facepalm*

At this point, I'm guessing the drive is completely hosed and there's nothing we can do to get it fixed? There's valuable data on that drive which, if lost, could have far-reaching repurcussions.

This post has been edited by RustyComputer: 22 March 2011 - 10:34 PM

Follow my previous advice.

Actually, after listening to a louder video she decided her computer didn't sound like it was making a "click of death" (slow internets wouldn't let me edit the post) but yup, we'll have to try the things outlined above...

EDIT: She's been trying some boot-disk related fixes on her own. One of them, involving chkdsk or something, apparently repeatedly fixes stuff in sectors 30464-30468. After every one it says "Deleting corrupt attribute record (128, "")".

Then it hangs.

If she removes the boot CD a ton more lines fly up the screen, again diplaying the corrupt attribute record notice for every sector it fixes. It then says something about an orphaned something (can't remember).

It does this every time.

She's currently on the phone with a local computer guru, and it's kind of late anyway, so while I'm waiting for a chance to put your advice into action, do you have any idea what this stuff means?

This post has been edited by RustyComputer: 22 March 2011 - 11:43 PM

Well, she sent it off to said local person. The racket was indeed the hard drive, but it still works and everything is there. The problem was... wait for it... drumroll please...

VIPRE antivirus! When said local person took VIPRE out startup, the computer worked fine

In the mean time, we'll be backing up anything that's important. Glad to get that one behind us.

As for the disk diagnostics, I couldn't have because my mother was busy trying to fix it, then sending taking it to the local person so they could fix it.

Thanks for the update