Evan Kaye - 2022-05-23

I've been trying to set up system drive encryption on an old (~2016) HP laptop with Windows 10. Disk encryption would proceed to (I think) about 21%, and then the system would start acting very strange. I could move the mouse but not get it onto the taskbar, I could open windows but they wouldn't show their data. After a hard reboot, the system would often report that the hard drive was missing, until I powered down completely for several minutes. After rebooting, I decrypted the drive, and started encrypting again, and once again it got stuck at 21% and brought the whole system down. The laptop's built-in drive test gave an ambiguous "warning".

From this I concluded that there was a sector on the SSD that was so bad that just accessing it caused the whole drive to become unresponsive. So I swapped out the drive for another one (an old drive, but I have no reason to think anything's wrong with it). I did a "factory reset" on the existing Windows 10 installation and confirmed that the drive test showed no issues. This time the encryption proceeded to 91%, at which point the whole system became basically unresponsive (but it always came back up after reboot without complaining about a missing drive).

I thought that I could avoid the issue by shrinking the system partition, but that just caused the issue to occur at about 90% instead, no matter how much I shrank it. So I used diskpart to clean the entire disk, repartitioned it from MBR to GPT, installed a fresh copy of Windows 10, and installed VeraCrypt as the very first thing I did. Now encryption is up to 26%, but proceeding at a snail's pace. It took about five hours to get from 20 to 26%, and it's reporting 21 more hours to go (and this figure hasn't changed for a few hours). The system also freezes up from time to time, although it always unfreezes again.

Is this normal, and if not, does anyone know what's going on?