Hard drive keeps going corrupt upon reboot

[Jon Davis]

Every other time I reboot my computer, WinXP's ChkDsk thingamajitter comes
up and scans my hard drive, and the other half of the time it boots up with
a bunch of files all corrupted. After getting past the boot sequence,
though, the computer runs fine. It's only at reboot that it starts finding
all these files corrupted. I can be going for days and not reboot and have
very few problems, but then when I reboot it starts choking on corrupt
files, and I reboot again and ChkDsk comes up and scans the hard drive and
pretty soon I find this message box telling me that I'm running on a backup
copy of my registry.

What are some possible causes of such behavior? The computer is only about a
year old.

I'm also getting mouse freezes for about five seconds every five minutes or
so. Not sure if it's related (doubtful).

I built this PC. This is like my tenth PC built for myself over the years,
but I'm thinking about going with Dell from now on. Meantime, I need to
figure out what's going on here.

Software:
Windows XP Pro
.NET Framework 1.1
Visual Studio 2003
MS Office 2003
etc.

Hardware:

Western Digital 80GB 120MB-cache hard drive
Asus A7N8X motherboard
nVidia GeForce 4200 Ti
etc.

 

[kony]

Every other time I reboot my computer, WinXP's ChkDsk thingamajitter comes
up and scans my hard drive, and the other half of the time it boots up with
a bunch of files all corrupted. After getting past the boot sequence,
though, the computer runs fine. It's only at reboot that it starts finding
all these files corrupted. I can be going for days and not reboot and have
very few problems, but then when I reboot it starts choking on corrupt
files, and I reboot again and ChkDsk comes up and scans the hard drive and
pretty soon I find this message box telling me that I'm running on a backup
copy of my registry.

What are some possible causes of such behavior? The computer is only about a
year old.

I'm also getting mouse freezes for about five seconds every five minutes or
so. Not sure if it's related (doubtful).

I built this PC. This is like my tenth PC built for myself over the years,
but I'm thinking about going with Dell from now on. Meantime, I need to
figure out what's going on here.

Software:
Windows XP Pro
.NET Framework 1.1
Visual Studio 2003
MS Office 2003
etc.

Hardware:

Western Digital 80GB 120MB-cache hard drive
Asus A7N8X motherboard
nVidia GeForce 4200 Ti
etc.

Check your voltage levels, preferribly with a multimeter at the power
supply connector. What make/model of power supply?

Run the hard drive manufacturer's diagnostics, available for D/L from
their website if not included in retail packaged drive... think it's
called "Data Lifeguard Tools", floppy.

Check memory for several hours with http://www.memtest86.com

Check hard drive power and data cables, try a different data cable.

 

[Jeff]

Every other time I reboot my computer, WinXP's ChkDsk thingamajitter comes
up and scans my hard drive, and the other half of the time it boots up with
a bunch of files all corrupted. After getting past the boot sequence,
though, the computer runs fine. It's only at reboot that it starts finding
all these files corrupted. I can be going for days and not reboot and have
very few problems, but then when I reboot it starts choking on corrupt
files, and I reboot again and ChkDsk comes up and scans the hard drive and
pretty soon I find this message box telling me that I'm running on a backup
copy of my registry.

What are some possible causes of such behavior? The computer is only about a
year old.

I'm also getting mouse freezes for about five seconds every five minutes or
so. Not sure if it's related (doubtful).

I built this PC. This is like my tenth PC built for myself over the years,
but I'm thinking about going with Dell from now on. Meantime, I need to
figure out what's going on here.

Software:
Windows XP Pro
.NET Framework 1.1
Visual Studio 2003
MS Office 2003
etc.

Hardware:

Western Digital 80GB 120MB-cache hard drive
Asus A7N8X motherboard
nVidia GeForce 4200 Ti
etc.

Are you running a BlackIce firewall? The "Witty" worm infects computers
running BlackIce and randomly writes to the hard disk. If that is the
case, there is no fix other than to reformat and reinstall Windows XP.

There is an interesting analysis of the worm here:
http://www.caida.org/analysis/security/witty/

They say that:

.. Witty was the first widely propagated Internet worm to carry a
destructive payload.
.. Witty was started in an organized manner with an order of magnitude
more ground-zero hosts than any previous worm.
.. Witty represents the shortest known interval between vulnerability
disclosure and worm release -- it began to spread the day after the ISS
vulnerability was publicized.
.. Witty spread through a host population in which every compromised host
was doing something proactive to secure their computers and networks.
.. Witty spread through a population almost an order of magnitude smaller
than that of previous worms, demonstrating the viability of worms as an
automated mechanism to rapidly compromise machines on the Internet, even
in niches without a software monopoly.

Jeff Bean

 

[Shep©]

Every other time I reboot my computer, WinXP's ChkDsk thingamajitter comes
up and scans my hard drive, and the other half of the time it boots up with
a bunch of files all corrupted. After getting past the boot sequence,
though, the computer runs fine. It's only at reboot that it starts finding
all these files corrupted. I can be going for days and not reboot and have
very few problems, but then when I reboot it starts choking on corrupt
files, and I reboot again and ChkDsk comes up and scans the hard drive and
pretty soon I find this message box telling me that I'm running on a backup
copy of my registry.

What are some possible causes of such behavior? The computer is only about a
year old.

I'm also getting mouse freezes for about five seconds every five minutes or
so. Not sure if it's related (doubtful).

I built this PC. This is like my tenth PC built for myself over the years,
but I'm thinking about going with Dell from now on. Meantime, I need to
figure out what's going on here.

Software:
Windows XP Pro
.NET Framework 1.1
Visual Studio 2003
MS Office 2003
etc.

Hardware:

Western Digital 80GB 120MB-cache hard drive
Asus A7N8X motherboard
nVidia GeForce 4200 Ti
etc.

I would suspect faulty RAM.



--
Free Windows/PC help,
http://www.geocities.com/sheppola/trouble.html
email shepATpartyheld.de
Free songs to download and,"BURN" :O)
http://www.soundclick.com/bands/8/nomessiahsmusic.htm

 

[DaveW]

Bad RAM sticks or memory timing errors will cause the same problems that you
are having. In my case the motherboard chipset was giving memory timing
errors that caused the same problem that you have. The problem went away
after I changed the motherboard.

Try using:
http://www.memtest86.com

 

[Reg]

The first think to do is remove the H/D and try it in a second PC if
ok try the memory I have add CPU go faulty. If you have a copy of
partition magic try running it and if it fails to load and you get a
CPU dump it is most likely the CPU as failed. Sorry my english is not
good as I am from Italy.