A detective story -XP heals itself?

[Earl Lewis]

Ok, here's a murdered body in a room that's locked from the inside.
C'mon Sherlocks: Last week my XP suddenly shut down like I'd hit the
Reset switch. It rebooted and came right back up. When such a thing
happens I immediately go the Windows disk check and run it on C:
It failed. From cmd I did a chkdsk c: /f
Chkdsk ran on bootup and fixed something in stage 1. It rebooted. I
went to Windows disk check and it still refused to run. It failed in
Stage 2 about 25% the way thru this time.

Somehow after several boots and getting nowhere, for some reason I
told Eudora to check my email. Real dumb as I'd had to turn Norton AV
off so chkdsk would run on bootup. Anyway Eudora went into la-la land,
I couldn't run TaskManager, CPU usage at 100%. I got impatient and
pushed the reset button. On reboot got BlueScreenOfDeath.

I had a DeviceImage2002 backup 3 days old, so I elected to restore
this image. This is lengthy process at it operates in DR DOS and takes
5 or 6 hours. It finally finished but found an error "cross connected
files" or some such. I OK'd and it finished. Rebooted successfully
into Windows. Went to the disk check, still failed about 25% thru
stage 2. Also when I tried to check email Eudora went to its la-la
land just like it had with previous disk image. (Eudora's inbasket was
showing mail from 3 days previous, the image restore DID happen.)

1:30am in morning so I gave up. Next day I would go back 1 week and
throw that image on.

Got up and booted PC. Before doing anything I would check to see if
problem was exactly as I remembered, or had I been too groggy to
understand what I'd seen the night before.

Tried Windows disk check, it ran perfectly. Eudora went out and got my
email with no burps. Apparently Windows fixed itself overnight?????
(My SystemRestore had been turned off the last 3 months, I don't think
it went back to previous time?).

I cannot remember if I ever shut the machine down between the time I
Restored the image and 1:30am when I gave up for the day.

From the above facts what's a sensible explanation? I suspect the
butler.


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[Galen]

In Earl Lewis had this to say:

My reply is at the bottom of your sent message:

Ok, here's a murdered body in a room that's locked from the inside.
C'mon Sherlocks: Last week my XP suddenly shut down like I'd hit the
Reset switch. It rebooted and came right back up. When such a thing
happens I immediately go the Windows disk check and run it on C:
It failed. From cmd I did a chkdsk c: /f
Chkdsk ran on bootup and fixed something in stage 1. It rebooted. I
went to Windows disk check and it still refused to run. It failed in
Stage 2 about 25% the way thru this time.

Somehow after several boots and getting nowhere, for some reason I
told Eudora to check my email. Real dumb as I'd had to turn Norton AV
off so chkdsk would run on bootup. Anyway Eudora went into la-la land,
I couldn't run TaskManager, CPU usage at 100%. I got impatient and
pushed the reset button. On reboot got BlueScreenOfDeath.

I had a DeviceImage2002 backup 3 days old, so I elected to restore
this image. This is lengthy process at it operates in DR DOS and takes
5 or 6 hours. It finally finished but found an error "cross connected
files" or some such. I OK'd and it finished. Rebooted successfully
into Windows. Went to the disk check, still failed about 25% thru
stage 2. Also when I tried to check email Eudora went to its la-la
land just like it had with previous disk image. (Eudora's inbasket was
showing mail from 3 days previous, the image restore DID happen.)

1:30am in morning so I gave up. Next day I would go back 1 week and
throw that image on.

Got up and booted PC. Before doing anything I would check to see if
problem was exactly as I remembered, or had I been too groggy to
understand what I'd seen the night before.

Tried Windows disk check, it ran perfectly. Eudora went out and got my
email with no burps. Apparently Windows fixed itself overnight?????
(My SystemRestore had been turned off the last 3 months, I don't think
it went back to previous time?).

I cannot remember if I ever shut the machine down between the time I
Restored the image and 1:30am when I gave up for the day.

From the above facts what's a sensible explanation? I suspect the
butler.


Remove no_spam to reply email

It was likely the cook. You can tell because he had baggy eyes the next
morning. Normally a cook would have been in bed early so they could rise and
prepare breakfast. This one had baggy eyes which means that they'd been
awake throughout the night - and the only reason they'd have been awake
would have been to fix your PC.

Actually the keyboard gremlins crawled out and fixed it - they do that at
times.

A realistic answer is that no one can give you a definitive answer here.
Strange stuff happens and with millions of lines of code it's a more
realistic opinion to be happy when it works at all.

Now... A simple guess? NTFS has the capacity to say, "This sector's trash,
skip it." That may have been the problem and could mean there's an off
chance of a hardware failure in your future or simply a burp in that the
heads weren't aligned properly or, worse, something even more mysterious.
The NT File System has some good features, one of them is that it can self
heal well enough on the fly so that checking the disk manually for errors is
seldom required. You do have it as NFTS yes? If not then the whole theory
above is shot to hell.

Anyhow...

Some gibberish is here about chkdsk...

Chkdsk, the reality:
http://kgiii.info/windows/XP/general/chkdsk.html

--
Galen - MS MVP - Windows (Shell/User & IE)
http://dts-l.org/
http://kgiii.info/

"At present I am, as you know, fairly busy, but I propose to devote my
declining years to the composition of a textbook which shall focus the
whole art of detection into one volume." - Sherlock Holmes

 

[Peter A. Stavrakoglou]

Ok, here's a murdered body in a room that's locked from the inside.
C'mon Sherlocks: Last week my XP suddenly shut down like I'd hit the
Reset switch. It rebooted and came right back up. When such a thing
happens I immediately go the Windows disk check and run it on C:
It failed. From cmd I did a chkdsk c: /f
Chkdsk ran on bootup and fixed something in stage 1. It rebooted. I
went to Windows disk check and it still refused to run. It failed in
Stage 2 about 25% the way thru this time.

Somehow after several boots and getting nowhere, for some reason I
told Eudora to check my email. Real dumb as I'd had to turn Norton AV
off so chkdsk would run on bootup. Anyway Eudora went into la-la land,
I couldn't run TaskManager, CPU usage at 100%. I got impatient and
pushed the reset button. On reboot got BlueScreenOfDeath.

I had a DeviceImage2002 backup 3 days old, so I elected to restore
this image. This is lengthy process at it operates in DR DOS and takes
5 or 6 hours. It finally finished but found an error "cross connected
files" or some such. I OK'd and it finished. Rebooted successfully
into Windows. Went to the disk check, still failed about 25% thru
stage 2. Also when I tried to check email Eudora went to its la-la
land just like it had with previous disk image. (Eudora's inbasket was
showing mail from 3 days previous, the image restore DID happen.)

1:30am in morning so I gave up. Next day I would go back 1 week and
throw that image on.

Got up and booted PC. Before doing anything I would check to see if
problem was exactly as I remembered, or had I been too groggy to
understand what I'd seen the night before.

Tried Windows disk check, it ran perfectly. Eudora went out and got my
email with no burps. Apparently Windows fixed itself overnight?????
(My SystemRestore had been turned off the last 3 months, I don't think
it went back to previous time?).

I cannot remember if I ever shut the machine down between the time I
Restored the image and 1:30am when I gave up for the day.

From the above facts what's a sensible explanation? I suspect the
butler.

It was Colonel Mustard in the computer room with the lead pipe.

 

[MAP]

Ok, here's a murdered body in a room that's locked from the inside.
C'mon Sherlocks: Last week my XP suddenly shut down like I'd hit the
Reset switch. It rebooted and came right back up. When such a thing
happens I immediately go the Windows disk check and run it on C:
It failed. From cmd I did a chkdsk c: /f
Chkdsk ran on bootup and fixed something in stage 1. It rebooted. I
went to Windows disk check and it still refused to run. It failed in
Stage 2 about 25% the way thru this time.

Somehow after several boots and getting nowhere, for some reason I
told Eudora to check my email. Real dumb as I'd had to turn Norton AV
off so chkdsk would run on bootup. Anyway Eudora went into la-la land,
I couldn't run TaskManager, CPU usage at 100%. I got impatient and
pushed the reset button. On reboot got BlueScreenOfDeath.

I had a DeviceImage2002 backup 3 days old, so I elected to restore
this image. This is lengthy process at it operates in DR DOS and takes
5 or 6 hours. It finally finished but found an error "cross connected
files" or some such. I OK'd and it finished. Rebooted successfully
into Windows. Went to the disk check, still failed about 25% thru
stage 2. Also when I tried to check email Eudora went to its la-la
land just like it had with previous disk image. (Eudora's inbasket was
showing mail from 3 days previous, the image restore DID happen.)

1:30am in morning so I gave up. Next day I would go back 1 week and
throw that image on.

Got up and booted PC. Before doing anything I would check to see if
problem was exactly as I remembered, or had I been too groggy to
understand what I'd seen the night before.

Tried Windows disk check, it ran perfectly. Eudora went out and got my
email with no burps. Apparently Windows fixed itself overnight?????
(My SystemRestore had been turned off the last 3 months, I don't think
it went back to previous time?).

I cannot remember if I ever shut the machine down between the time I
Restored the image and 1:30am when I gave up for the day.

From the above facts what's a sensible explanation? I suspect the
butler.


Remove no_spam to reply email

Apperently you shut it off...........or did I misread?

Sometimes shutting a computer down and leaving it alone for awhile can cure
many ills.