XP home - chkdsk - unspecified error

[Richard Boaz]

i have an external onetouch maxtor drive attached to my pc running XP home.

at bootup this morning, chkdsk was automatically executed against it. at
stage 2 (of 5) of the chkdsk process, immediately after issuing the
message "attempting to correct a minor error in file 451", chkdsk exits
with an unspecified error.

before chkdsk, the disk did have errors, but only relating to certain
directories (when attempting to access via explorer), while other
directories were fine. with chkdsk now failing in the middle of its
attempt to fix the problems, the entire disk is now inaccessible, while
the files that were still there are, most likely, still there, just not
reachable.

i located a problem within W2000 whereby chkdsk could exit with an
unspecified error when executing against disks >4G, but did not find any
information in this regard relating to XP.

anybody else aware of "unspecified error" message for chkdsk for XP home?
any ideas as to how to get around this problem so that the files still
resident can be extracted? ideally, i would simply like get the files
that are still good and then reformat the disk from the beginning and try
to make a clean start.

any thoughts/ideas/suggestions are greatly appreciated.

cheers,

richard boaz
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Alceryes]

i have an external onetouch maxtor drive attached to my pc running XP home.

at bootup this morning, chkdsk was automatically executed against it. at
stage 2 (of 5) of the chkdsk process, immediately after issuing the
message "attempting to correct a minor error in file 451", chkdsk exits
with an unspecified error.

before chkdsk, the disk did have errors, but only relating to certain
directories (when attempting to access via explorer), while other
directories were fine. with chkdsk now failing in the middle of its
attempt to fix the problems, the entire disk is now inaccessible, while
the files that were still there are, most likely, still there, just not
reachable.

i located a problem within W2000 whereby chkdsk could exit with an
unspecified error when executing against disks >4G, but did not find any
information in this regard relating to XP.

anybody else aware of "unspecified error" message for chkdsk for XP home?
any ideas as to how to get around this problem so that the files still
resident can be extracted? ideally, i would simply like get the files
that are still good and then reformat the disk from the beginning and try
to make a clean start.

any thoughts/ideas/suggestions are greatly appreciated.

cheers,

richard boaz
(e-mail address removed)

Can you execute a manual chkdsk on the drive? Using both the options 'fix
file system files' and 'scan for and repair bad sectors'.

 

[Richard Boaz]

yes, i had run it manually and all that, tried everything, always exits
mid-stream with unspecified error.

decided to simply retrieve all the files from hard drive using R-Studio
(yet again microsoft forces me to spend money elsewhere to solve a problem
created in the first instance by them, how much money gets moved around
for this reason? ultimately i find this more than unacceptable. if they
can trap the error and prevent the program from "crashing", why can't they
print out a more useful error message? sloppy, lazy programming that
leaves the end-user royally screwed whose only option is then to, yet
again, reach into his/her pocket, artificially creating an economy that
cannot hold itself up forever...)

thanks for following up, though.

richard