CHDSK message Vista won't boot

[Ken]

Hello, I get the following message on my VISTA computer and I need to know
is the hard drive dead and will I have to FDISK, or equivalent and reload
windows from restore disk, or can Windows Vista be recovered without wipind
the hard drive clean by and FDISK. Here is the screen:

" Chcecking the file system on C: The type of the file system is NTFS.

One of your disks needs to be checked for consistency. you may cancel the
disk check, but it is strongly recommended that you continue. windows will
now check the disk.

CHKDSK is verfying files (Stage 1 of 3).....
Deleted corrupt attribute list entry with type code 128 in file 36538.
Deleting corrupt attribute record (128, "")
from file record segment 15303.
Readable file record segment 15303 is not writeable."

This is all I get when I boot.

Help thanks
Ken

 

[Rick Rogers]

Hi,

To check the state of the hard drive you should download a diagnostic
utility from the manufacturer. What it appears from your message below is
that you may simply have a bad sector, this does not necessarily mean the
whole drive is bad. The problem may be that this sector contains necessary
information for the operating system to load. If necessary to reinstall,
simply do so without formatting so that data in the current installation is
not lost. You may find though, that your restore disk is not capable of
this, it depends on the manufacturer.

Fdisk, by the way, is an old tool from the now-defunct Win9x line and is not
used in an NT system. NT uses a command line tool called diskpart.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org

 

[TheGremlin]

Thanks Rick, You're saying do a re-install of the OS (Vista) not a restore,
right?

BTW, I've use a Win98 boot floppy on XP machines with a corrupted HD to
FDISK and

and reload XP. Most XP install disks will see the DOS partition and
reformat to

NTFS. Must admit, haven't tried it on a VISTA yet.

Where would a run diskpart from since I don't think the box will boot in

safe mode?

Thanks Again

 

[Rick Rogers]

Hi,

Vista won't use a FAT32 partition, it needs to be NTFS, so using fdisk to
repartition would be useless. Diskpart has to be run from the recovery
console accessed by booting the Vista disk. Most recovery disks won't have
that as an option, it's a limitation of options imposed by the system
manufacturer.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org

 

[R. C. White]

Hi, Ken (TheGremlin?).

Where would a run diskpart from since I don't think the box will boot in
safe mode?

There are TWO DiskParts in WinXP. One is a part of the Recovery Console,
reached by booting from the WinXP CD. This DiskPart command is quite
limited. About all it can do is create and delete partitions. This
DiskPart does not exist in Vista or Win7 since there is no Recovery Console
after WinXP.

There is also DiskPart.exe, a command shell reached from the
WinXP/Vista/Win7 desktop. This DiskPart is VERY powerful - but you can't
use it if you can't boot into WinXP or later. From the desktop, open a
Command Prompt window and run DiskPart. It may take several seconds for the
shell to open, then you can type Dir or Help to see a list of commands
available in the shell. (Type Exit to exit the shell back to the Command
Prompt.)

It's past time to throw away the Win9x floppy disk and forget FDISK and
FORMAT.exe. DiskPart.exe and its GUI interface, Disk Management, are the
tools to use with Win2K and later versions of Windows.

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP
Windows Live Mail 2009 (14.0.8089.0726) in Win7 Ultimate x64