CHKDSK "cannot determine the filesystem"

[Frank Haber]

Here's another seemingly totally benign error, which contains a registry
string, so I'm posting here...

Yet another of my 2k Pro SP4 machine gives this benign error at boot from
CHKDSK, whether or not the dirty flag is set on any HD partition. The error
is always on the 20G FAT32 boot/system C: disk, which is a separate physical
disk with no other partitions on it. The second, slave ATA HD was formatted
D:, extended/basic NTFS by Win2k.

I've set the ini to /SOS so I can see this, but I'd need a tee utility to
capture it accurately. As best I can grab it by eye, it runs

(system switches from graphical progress bar to console-text)
checking file system on D:
the volume is clean
Cannot determine file system of
drive\??\volume{46ff....etc....more...hex...clsid..}
checking file system on C:
the volume is clean

1. is this CHDSK talking?
2. which volume is it confused about?
3. Is it to worry? Just a bad partition type stamp? What?

I forget which utility first partitioned the 20G FAT boot disk, but I think it
must have been 98SE's FDISK. There are no stray diagnostic partitions on the
drive, but there is some unpartitioned space at the end.

The only thing in the kb I can find refers to clustering setups, which this
ain't.

 

[Frank Haber]

Bump.

 

[Mark V]

Here's another seemingly totally benign error, which contains a
registry string, so I'm posting here...

Yet another of my 2k Pro SP4 machine gives this benign error at
boot from CHKDSK, whether or not the dirty flag is set on any HD
partition. The error is always on the 20G FAT32 boot/system C:
disk, which is a separate physical disk with no other partitions
on it. The second, slave ATA HD was formatted D:, extended/basic
NTFS by Win2k.

I've set the ini to /SOS so I can see this, but I'd need a tee
utility to capture it accurately. As best I can grab it by eye,
it runs

(system switches from graphical progress bar to console-text)
checking file system on D:
the volume is clean
Cannot determine file system of
drive\??\volume{46ff....etc....more...hex...clsid..}
checking file system on C:
the volume is clean

1. is this CHDSK talking?
2. which volume is it confused about?
3. Is it to worry? Just a bad partition type stamp? What?

I forget which utility first partitioned the 20G FAT boot disk,
but I think it must have been 98SE's FDISK. There are no stray
diagnostic partitions on the drive, but there is some
unpartitioned space at the end.

The only thing in the kb I can find refers to clustering setups,
which this ain't.

I take a stab at it.

Check in Disk Managment that there are no phantom drives and all
looks "normal" including each volume marked as "healthy"

Try using chkntfs.exe to reset the "autocheck" in the registry.
Reboot.

?

 

[Frank Haber]

Thanks for the stab, but no joy yet.

Check in Disk Management that there are no phantom drives and all looks

"normal" including each volume marked as "healthy"

Everything's healthy. C: shows partition -- basic -- FAT32, even though it's
a whole physical drive.

D: shows Simple -- Dynamic -NTFS

Normal, I think.

===

Try using chkntfs.exe to reset the "autocheck" in the registry. Reboot

I didn't know that chkntfs worked on FAT. It's not trivially intuitive from
the EXE name (g).

Nothing is dirty today. A full /F check sequence doesn't run very often. My
complaint is mostly the confusion displayed at boot.

I booted a couple of times and let my eyes be my tachistoscope. I got a
headache, but I did write down part of the hex string which gives me two
Google hits.

1. A guy on some mailing list who got

Cannot determine file system of drive
\??\volume{46ff3593-6819-11d8-a1e3-00e02944fb8a}.

I think that's my string, exactly. He took a picture (!). I'm not going to
go that far.


2. My own message of last week.

Neither of us got an answer (g). But hey, you tried. And now Google-Deja
will be saturated with this.

-Frank