Defender Installation- lost secondary drive recognition

[Guest]

I have XP Home Ed; version 2002 Service Pack 2 on a 1GHz AMD with 640MB ram.
I have used 2 internal hard drives - C for operating system and
applications- D for Data and scratch disk for Photoshop; operating
successfully for over a year.

Last night I downloaded the latest Windows Defender to get rid of an 'App
failed to initialize 0x800106ba' prompt that would appear at startup. I lost
connection and recognition of my secondary drive somewhere in the process.
While Defender was downloading, I heard the CD drive spin and remembered I
had forgotten to take out an Epson Printer install disk. I quickly removed
the disk and all seemed well. While Defender continued to download, I got a
Windows prompt that said "The disk in Drive D is not formatted. Do you want
to format it now?" I thought it was strange since E is my CD drive, so I
selected cancel and it closed. After awhile it came up again and I wrote the
prompt down verbatim, just in case, and hit cancel. It closed.

Defender finished and updated itself, scanned my computer, and found
nothing, All seemed well. I used Norton Speed disk to optimize my D drive
overnight. I had optimized C the night before. I do this regularly.

Woke up this morning, selected the analyze button to check the D's
optimization - 1.1% fragmented. All looked well. Exited Norton.

I went to reboot and the prompt above about the "disk in Drive D" not being
formatted came up again I think when I went to shut down. I canceled out of
it again thinking rebooting would allow it to straighten itself out - I
restarted the machine to see if Windows Defender ‘failed to initialize’
prompt was gone. It was.

I'm on a deadline and went to work in Photoshop. It froze. Ended task
through Task Manager. May have rebooted. Started PS again, it came up but
very slowly but did load. Checked the memory allocations and noticed the
scratch disk I had set to my D drive was gone (I work with large files and
had a secondary scratch set to D drive which worked beautifully) No D drive
selection was present to reset it.

I tried to open file from D drive and got ‘data missing,’ or something to
that effect. Went to Device Manager and saw both C and D drives - no
indication of problems with either at first glance. (Both there; Working
properly etc.)

Went back to Norton Speed Disk and although the D drive was there before
reboot- only the C drive now showed.

I don't think I had rebooted the machine since I saw the 'Disk in the D
drive not formatted' prompt that occurred during Windows Defender
installation. It was after I rebooted that the D drive disappeared from
access. Since it was showing up when I checked the Optimization when I got
up, best case scenario – all data is sitting on the D drive and I need to get
it recognized properly again. Here I’m at a loss. I went to an XP newsgroup
and was told to boot off the XP disk, go to the recovery console, and run
CHKDSK but this is unknown territory for me. I read about the recovery
console and the help on CHKDSK but I’m not familiar with the commands once
there and it didn’t make enough sense to me to dive in.

So I thought I’d check with the Defender list. Does what happened make sense
to anyone that can explain it to me? Is it possible for me to fix it?

Thank you in advance for any timely help, advice, and insight you could give
me.

 

[Guest]

Hello Soul_Signs,

Before you tackle the error message, you need to have your PC running whit
out problems

Here is the latest list with intructions about CHKDSK

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315265/


I hope you can use it.

This is for your unformation

•
Running chkdsk
To run chkdsk on a fixed disk, you must be a member of the Administrators
group.
•
Checking a locked drive at restart
If you want chkdsk to correct disk errors, you cannot have open files on the
drive. If files are open, the following error message appears:
Chkdsk cannot run because the volume is in use by another process. Would you
like to schedule this volume to be checked the next time the system restarts?
(Y/N)
If you choose to check the drive the next time you restart the computer,
chkdsk checks the drive and corrects errors automatically when you restart
the computer. If the drive partition is a boot partition, chkdsk
automatically restarts the computer after it checks the drive.
•
Reporting disk errors
Chkdsk examines disk space and disk use for the file allocation table (FAT)
and NTFS file systems. Chkdsk provides information specific to each file
system in a status report. The status report shows errors found in the file
system. If you run chkdsk without the /f command-line option on an active
partition, it might report spurious errors because it cannot lock the drive.
You should use chkdsk occasionally on each disk to check for errors.
•
Fixing disk errors
Chkdsk corrects disk errors only if you specify the /f command-line option.
Chkdsk must be able to lock the drive to correct errors. Because repairs
usually change a disk's file allocation table and sometimes cause a loss of
data, chkdsk sends a confirmation message similar to the following:
10 lost allocation units found in 3 chains.
Convert lost chains to files?
If you press Y, Windows saves each lost chain in the root directory as a
file with a name in the format Filennnn.chk. When chkdsk finishes, you can
check these files to see if they contain any data you need. If you press N,
Windows fixes the disk, but it does not save the contents of the lost
allocation units.
If you do not use the /f command-line option, chkdsk sends a message if a
file needs to be fixed, but it does not fix any errors.
If you use chkdsk /f on a very large disk (for example, 70 gigabytes) or a
disk with a very large number of files (for example, millions of files),
chkdsk might take a long time (for example, over several days) to complete.
The computer is not available during this time because chkdsk does not
relinquish control until it is finished.

Good luck
--

 

[Bill Sanderson MVP]

I agree with the advice to run chkdsk. You needn't run it off the recover
console--but that would be a good idea.

Frankly, this looks like a hardware failure to me, although sometimes such
issues are transient.

If it is transient, I'd recommend backing up valuable data on the D drive
asap.

Pay close attention to sound as you start the system from a shutdown--disks
spin up, and usually make some sounds as they seek to track zero and
calibrate for operation. Have these sounds changed? Can you hear both
drives?

Chkdsk should not be risky--you can tell it not to make changes, if in
doubt.

Is the drive still recognized at the bios level? If so, that's a Good
Thing, but doesn't guarantee that there isn't a problem.

--