I allowed someone who wasn't careful to use my computer.
I allowed someone who wasn't careful to use my computer.
I shared my gaming PC with a friend, and they said it’s running slow. My system boots quickly but struggles under heavy loads, possibly due to too many open programs or hardware issues. They mentioned a restart takes 5-10 minutes, which isn’t ideal. Now I’m stuck with a confusing setup: only my HDD is being read, the SSD isn’t showing up in BIOS, and it’s partitioned with half as a new drive and the other wiped. I’m locked out, can’t change settings or view status, and I’m at work now—no time to fix it. I’m worried about losing my games if I don’t resolve this quickly. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Honestly, reset everything and begin again. This individual caused a lot of issues with the computer, so it's unclear what else might be happening. Just use a USB drive, install Windows using the media creation tool, remove all partitions from every drive, and set up Windows on the SSD. https://www.microsoft.com/software-download/windows11
In the Windows installer, you'll find the setup files and instructions to install the operating system.
Notice the issues you're facing. Consider renaming your disk using diskpart, even though the interface might hide options. Also, ensure the drive gets a letter before scanning it with chkdsk. Open a command prompt with admin rights, run diskpart, then select the correct disk and assign it a new letter. Once done, execute chkdsk with the new letter to complete the process.
It's strange that your recovery and EFI partitions have letters assigned. That's why they appear in Explorer. I'm not sure what caused this. Could malware be involved? Maybe the person who lent your computer accidentally downloaded something harmful. You can follow similar steps as I described with diskpart, but instead of "assign letter=Z", you would use "remove letter=Z".