Explorer and Hard Drive Problem

[MMS]

I have a Dell workstation with a 160GB SATA WEstern Digital Drive in
it. It has been functioning fine for the last several years. I have
Norton Security installed on it, and regularly scan for viruses and
spyware. No problems, except some intermittent slowness recently.
Then, yesterday the computer booted, my wallpaper came up and no
icons, nothing! I did a search on the Internet, found a variety of
potentials, but decided to try and copy a known good explorer.exe into
the apporpriate directory.

When I tried to rename the old file, I got a cyclic reduncdancy
error...wouldn't let me change it. That reeked to me of a hard drive
problem. I went into the diagnostics on the drive, and sure enough,
there looks to be a bad spot on the drive.

When I got back into XP and was able to run only taskmanager, I found
a way to get to the XP version of "Scandisk". Told me it need to
schedule this, I said OK, rebooted, and it got stuck at 39% while
verifying, which is where it is sitting for the last hour and a half.

I need to run some sort of disk scanner and repair utility from a CD
(if possible), but have been looking to find a product that will work
off of a CD. Tried to install a few utilities on the hard drive, and
they all need the system to be rebooted to complete the
installs...ha! Unfortunately because of my situation, I never get to
that point.

Any ideas or suggestions about A) how to fix this, or B) a known,
solid working disk scan and repair utility that I can download, copy
onto a CD, makes the CD bootable, then run it from the CD?

ANy help would be greatly appreciated! I need some of the data on the
disk that was not backed up (my bad!)

Thanks!

 

[Rich Barry]

Give System Rescue Linux Live CD a try. You can get it here
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=systemrescue

You don't have to be a Linux User to benefit from the CD. Just read
the documentation
and you will be primarily interested in accessing FAT and NTFS.

 

[db ´¯`·.. >]

sometimes when the
desktop is blank but
the task manager is
accessible, it seems
that the registry file
fail to load.

what can be done is
under the process tab
of the task manager
simply kill the explorer.exe

then on first tab, click
on new task and run
explorer.exe

if the symptom you incurred
was a result of the registry
then the icons will pop right
up after re loading the
explorer process.

further, if the above method
worked, then the issue you
incurred is also indicative for
a need of tuning up your system.