Yup - that's the trouble with living in one C:, as you'd be obliged to
do when your HD is too small for what you're trying to do.
What ChkDsk will do in these situations is to set AutoChk to do the
work at a point early in the next OS boot, before the OS starts using
more files and writing to the drive.
How long have you waited?
First, check your physical HD's condition, preferably without booting
an OS that will write to it. For that, I use a Bart PE boot CDR with
HD Tune from
www.hdtune.com (which works from Windows too, it's just
I'd rather avoid that in this context). You can also check your HD
vendor's site for free diagnostics that may boot off their own disks,
though these may not give you the details you need (a glib "OK" may
mask a lot of "this is the 100th dead sector" SMART detail).
Personally, I'd avoid this sort of mess by:
- using a larger hard drive
- partitioning so that C: is small and data-free
- keeping C: and core data within the first 137G
- avoiding NTFS
Then I'd have recourse to better file system management tools, such as
DOS Mode's Scandisk (FATxx only, must be < 137G) and whatever the OS
does in its "engine room" C: doesn't stink up my data.
But as it is, the only things that can "fix" NTFS are the things that
are already falling on their ass. Plus, you have no control over what
they do. So you're next step is to evacuate your data, keep fiddling
with ChkDsk and AutoChk, and prepare for some sort of drastic
destructive "fix" like "just wipe and re-install Windows".
A disk that is 94% full is an unuseable disk.
Arguable, in the case of "one doomed C:" that has Windows running on
it; with XP, you'd like a few hundred Meg free, at least.
Not true, if the HD in question is sim0ply used to hold static data.
Read-only CDRs have 0 bytes free, and work just fine
If this was my machine then I would chose either of this paths:
a) Clean up things in order to maintain 20% free disk space (6 GBytes), or
b) Clone the old disk to a larger disk, e.g. one of 120 GBytes.
Since disks are so cheap, Option b) would be my preferred path.
Yep. But these new HDs are likely to be > 137G, so you need:
- a motherboard that "sees" > 137G
- XP SP2, either as the installed OS, or over XP SP1
XP "Gold" is deadly > 137G, and cannot even be safely installed.
XP SP1 is safe to instrall > 137G, but has some bugs that can trash
the HD's contents later. Specifically, certain contexts are not aware
of > 137G, e.g. the code that writes RAM dumps after a crash.
AFAIK, all of the unsafe contexts in SP1 apply to C:, or rather, where
the page file and hibernation stores are. That implies a C: that is
within the first 137G of a larger HD may be safe - even so, for this
and other reasons, I'd get SP2 on there asap.
--------------- ----- ---- --- -- - - -
Never turn your back on an installer program
