On Sat, 17 Jul 2004 15:22:00 -0700,
Thanks... No I do not have any indications that the
harddrive is bad. No Errorlogs/msgs/etc.
That's what I mean - several systems will hide these things from you.
The hard drive's own firmware will (or attempt to) copy the contents
of a failing sector to another "spare" sector, then updating the
internal addressing so that the OS can't tell the difference. This
won't show up in any logs, nor will you see bad blocks in any sort of
surface scan. The only clues you have are mouse-sticking pauses with
HD LED on or cluster count latency on DOS mode surface scan.
NTFS's driver code pulls the same stunt at the OS level - if NTFS's
code has difficulty reading a sector, it copies (or attempts to copy)
the contents of that cluster to another one, then alter file system
addressing to use the new one. This should be logged somewhere (but
may not be) and should be visible if anything shows clusters marked
"bad" on the volume (not sure if anything does).
ChkDsk /R and Scandisk thourough / surface scan do the same sort of
thing, but only when these operations are explictly run by the user or
implicitly triggered on startup in response to flags indicating disk
access failure in the previous Windows session. Scandisk may or may
not log to C:\Scandisk.log, whereas ChkDsk (hopefully) does its
logging deep in the bowels of Event Viewer - and don't expect
something obvious like "ChkDsk", it will somewhere obscure like
"Windows Logon" or something.
Everything now is running EXCEPT Defrag (waiting
on Chkdsk) and Chkdsk itself not running. So am still
stuck???????
ChkDsk and Defrag may be replaced by 3rd-party utilities (e.g. Norton
Utilities or SystemWorks etc.). If the 3rd-party utilities are badly
"uninstalled" (e.g. DelTree rather than Add/Remove), you may be left
with no "hooks" to the original MS tools.
XP's Defrag tends to be far more tolerant than Win9x when it comes to
"files in use" - in fact, I've not seen it refuse to operate or
restart the process. But ChkDsk /F or /R requires exclusive access to
the volume, and when that volume is C:, that's impossible while
Windows is in session. So ChkDsk sets up AutoChk to do the test early
in the system's next bootup. It's unlikely anything would be running
that early to upset AutoChk; suspect malware if so.
OTOH, maybe there's some sort of "thou shalt not" security/permissions
thing that is disallowing the use of Defrag and/or ChkDsk.
Have you tried via Safe Mode, Admin logon?
------------ ----- ---- --- -- - - - -
The most accurate diagnostic instrument
in medicine is the Retrospectoscope