Persistent Disk Checking during boot up

[Roy]

Hello group
There is one PC peculiarity that I would like to learn how to resolve.
That is everytime this PC boots up and after the WinXP logo appears
the disc checking routine starts up and it takes about nearly two
minutes sometimes even more for this to get done before the familiar
desktop wall paper appearance appears.

This PC from a cousin who showed it to me to see what was wrong; an
old desktop Pentium Celeron type with 256 mb or RAM and had O/S WinXP
Sp2 in it.
I was wondering if this has something to do with HDD fault but so far
I have not heard of any disk clicking which is attributed to faulty
hard drive.
I did disk checking using chksdc but everything appears normal.
Another thing that is unusual to this PC is the response time when a
certain file is opened takes some time and it usually hangs up often.
I have run the crap cleaner to remove any unnecessary dirt that may
have accumulated it.
This PC is protected by AVIRA antivirus free and is continuously
updated if needed and periodic scans were done. And so far any there
was serious malware ever found. A few days ago suspecting Avira may
have missed its task I installed Malwarebytes to check for possible
unrecognized malwares but so far there was none .
I would like to know if there some thing that is wrong with this
particular PC and what is it?
I have already exhausted every possibilities that I can think of as
the cause and is therefore looking for comments from people that might
have been already familiar with this peculiarity that I seldom
encounter in any PC I use

Roy

 

[Roy]

The drive indeed could be defective

Go the the website of the drive's manufacturer and get their diagnostic
utility and run it (free download)

If the full test finds an error, replace the drive at once

thanks for your input!. But as I never heard any of these known
clicking sound I was reluctant to just replace it.
In order to confirm I observed this particular PC for several days and
noticed that while its idle state it just shut down by itself (or
crashed?)....... that it needs to be restarted.
It was not like this previously as this PC was not designed to shut
down if its idle for some time .

The same routine is noticed anyway, the moment during boot up process
and after the Winxp logo appears it starts to disk check and it takes
quite a time before its done( mostly 5 minutes or more).
I was wondering if this could be the defect of the motherboard also as
the CMOS clock is malfunctioning also and the displayed time is
always late...even if I kept updating it regularly.

Roy