I Think There is an Issue with my HDD and SSD but I Do Not Know How to Confirm the Problem or Fix it

[Alex Greenberg]

I have searched through many forums and troubleshooting suggestion boards and have not found anything that sums up the issues I am having. The following are the known symptoms of whatever is plaguing my computer:

• Upon startup, no applications will open for a brief period, followed by my entire display flashing white, then a short loading period. Afterward, applications will open fine.
• File Explorer will sometimes not respond when I attempt to access either my hard drive or solid state drive and will need to be restarted through the Task Manager.
• File Explorer can not fully load "This PC". When I select This PC, File Explorer will start attempt to load This PC but the loading bar will never finish. Aside from this, everything will display normally and I will be able to access both of my drives-- so long as File Explorer does not stop responding.
• Certain applications will stop responding after specific events. These applications and their respective crash triggers include:
  • Steam can open and navigate the entire application fine, but stops responding whenever I attempt to install anything (application updates seem to work, however).
  • Autodesk Maya 2022 will open and seems to perform its native functions fine, but when I attempt to open an existing scene file, my hard drive does not appear and I cannot open anything within it (I store all of my Maya files in my hard drive, making this a critical issue). On top of this, when I cancel the "open scene" operation, Maya stops responding for a few minutes. It eventually regains functionality, but this is by no means normal behavior.
  • Substance Painter will not open at all and stops responding as soon as its initial loading icon appears.

These are the issues as I have encountered all of today. My reason for suspecting that there is a problem with my drives is that these issues are not isolated to any particular software and seem to stem from my computer attempting to access my drives. This could, of course, be an overarching issue with my OS as well-- I genuinely do not know.


I have tried many fixes from many different online forums, articles, and suggestion boards but nothing has worked. Some of the solutions I tried are as follows:

• Optimizing my drives
• Doing a system restore (I do not have system backups on and thus was only able to rollback a graphics driver update and the most recent Windows 10 optional updates)
• Disabling and re-enabling relevant drivers
• Updating my graphics driver, Windows 10, and any other drivers I could find that could be updated.
• Restarting throughout all of these attempted solutions
• Doing a clean boot
• Starting in Safe Mode. This was the only method that yielded any results; I did not encounter any issues with the File Explorer in Safe Mode. This leads me to believe that there is a software behind my problems. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to identify what software could be causing these issues and whether it is a third party software behind them or not.
• There are a few other, more minor solutions I have tried that I cannot specifically remember-- none of which seemed to make any difference.

I genuinely do not know how to proceed. If you have any suggestions at all, even ones that may help to just identify the problem, I would greatly appreciate it. I am trying to avoid a PC reset at all costs since I have configured a lot of software on my computer to specifically fit my needs-- also I work from home and do not have much time to reinstall and reformat so many programs.


My hardware specs are as follows:

• Intel i9 9900
• Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070

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