Last week I decided to upgrade my lenovo y500 laptop from windows 8.1 pro to windows 10. Immediately after installing everything was working fine except for intermittent bouts of extreme lag. Simple actions like clicking on the start menu or opening sublime text would take up to 30 minutes to complete. Everything would continue working properly if I just waited for the computer to work through the lock-up on its own, so I decided to suck it up until the weekend.
The last time the lag/lock-up happened was a few days ago. I ended up leaving the computer overnight and when I woke up it still hadn't worked out the issue. So I forced shutdown by holding the power button. When I tried to reboot, the windows boot manager went into a screen saying "attempting to repair" or something like that. That screen persisted for maybe 30 minutes before displaying a message along the lines of "repair failed, please try again" or something like that. I figured windows 10 was the problem, since the lock ups obviously coincided with the upgrade to win 10, and I have an 8.1 pro boot CD, so I decided to just try a clean install of windows 8.1. The windows 8.1 install fails every time part way through with a message along the lines of "disk error." I've also tried installing Ubuntu using a boot disk and I get basically the same error. The error shown by the Ubuntu installer is more specific than that shown by the windows installer and specifically says there's a problem with the hard disk.
Is there a way for me to wipe the hard disk and do a purely clean install? Or is it likely that there is a problem with the physical hardware?
I know this is a pretty vague question, but I'm just looking for someone to point me in the right direction. I don't even know where to start to diagnose whether or not there is a problem with the physical hardware.
Thanks!!!