W10 Laptop Boots to Desktop then stalls.

Loaned my Windows 10 Dell Inspiron laptop for the last couple of years. Laptop originally was W 8/8.1 and then upgraded to Windows 10. Complaint was that unit wouldn't boot up at times and was very sluggish.

I have booted this unit up a number of times - usually taking 5 to 10 mimutes, It does various things during boot up. At times the light blue screen indicating updates processing would appear and then go away. Perhaps one of the major W10 updates got corrupted. A few times I got to the desktop and was able to do a few things - very slowly. Typical happening - when I tried to use Windows Explorer to save Documents to a flash drive, it took Windows Explorer about 4 - 5 minutes to boot up and I was unable to select files or right click to check file sizes.

I tried to get to Safe mode three different times by tapping F8 from the time I pressed the Power Button. But was never able to get into Safe Mode. I took the HD out and put it in an enclosure and accessed it with another computer. I could see the data files and access them but was unable to open any of them - strange as some were PDFs and some were JPGs.

Any suggestions on how I can get this thing going?

 

Evan,
I had that possibility in the back of my mind. Right now I can't do any data backup using the unit itself. I will have to take the hard drive out again and put it in my Manhattan PC Clone and see if I can recover the data that way. Will give that another try this week.

 

Evan,
I put the hard drive from the PC in my adapter and connected it to my laptop (W10 Home 1803) and can see the files - identified as OS (E) in Windows Explorer. I'm mainly interested in photos and wp/spreadsheet documents. However, I am unable to open any of the files - which I normally can open routinely.

Photo files are identified as JPG files which I normally open with no problem. When I try to open a JPG photo in Photos, I get this message :

Document files identified as ***.doc, Microsoft Word exhibit similar problems. When I try to open one, I get a dialog box with ASCII Filter Options at upper left. There is an option to change the Character Set but I have no idea what to select - probably 50 or so options - all different country or regional options.

PDF files - pretty much the same. "Couldn't open PDF - something's keeping this PDF from opening".

Should I just consider the hard drive as kaput or am I missing something that might let me access the files? I think I may go ahead and save all the files I can to other media on the off chance that I may be able to come across some way to access them.

 

Evan,
Had a number of files that failed to copy but I think I got most of them copied to a spare HD. However, I still can't open the JPGs and PDFs. I just tried to upload one of the JPGs here to see if you could open it and got a red and black dialog box with this message

The file shows to be about 2.3 MB. Any thoughts what might be going on?