S
Sean Cullinan
Hi all,
I have one that I've NEVER seen before in my extensive
troubleshooting, and was hoping someone could help. Yesterday I came
home from work and my machine had rebooted itself. Not sure what
happened but it was at the login screen and when I left it was locked.
When I logged in I got a "Found New Hardware" display and a msgbox
prompting me to reboot. I immediately said "No" because I wanted to
see what was being installed. There was nothing in the device
manager. I also started getting all kinds of filesystem corruption
messages...mostly about system restore files being corrupted. I went
ahead and rebooted, and when I did the system would not come back up
due to disk corruption. I had to put in the XP disk and do a chkdsk
/R from the recovery console which did seem to fix the corruption, but
when I got back into windows all of my drives had two letters
associated with them. My c: drive was also available on G:, my D: on
H: and my F: on I:. Other than that the system seemed okay.
I went into device manager and only saw the 3 volumes (c:, d:, and
f
, and in disk management there was no other drive letters listed
other than c: d: and f:. It did however, not let me select g, h or i
if I wanted to "change" a drive letter which makes sense because I
think it queries explorer to enumerate the available drives.
I decided to play a bit to try to fix this (after backing up
everything) and found some interestin stuff out. My "f:" drive was
expendable so I decided to see what would happen if I formatted the I:
drive. To my surprise the I: drive formatted giving me 28 gigs of
free space, but the f: drive still had its contents on it. Hey what a
feature...I just got a free 28 gigs of space! Seriously, I cannot
explain this but it is not right. I then went into disk management
and completely removed this volume. Oddly while the f: drive
disappeared, my I: drive was still available. I then physically
removed the drives from the system (the f: drive was 2 15 gigs in a
raid 0 on a highpoint ata 100 raid controller) and when I got back
into windows I removed the dynamic disk from disk management and the
I: drive finally disappeared, the g: ghost drive became the f: ghost
drive and the h: ghost drive became the g: ghost drive. I then added
the disks back and before I even was able to reimport the disk in disk
management it popped back into explorer as the h: drive now. When I
re-added it in disk management (had to choose I: drive) I was back to
step one.
I decided that the registry may be the next place to poke around in so
I headed there. I messed around in hkey_local_machine/system/Mounted
devices where I saw the extra entries (DOSDevices/G: etc). I also
checked out hkey_current_user/software/microsoft/windows/currentversion/explorer/MountPoints2
and deleted the extraneous keys in there. I basically removed
EVERYTHING I could in the registry that looked extraneous and yet no
matter what I did the drives appeared. Its like its autodetecting
their presence.
Here are the specs of my system:
Hardware:
ABIT KT7A-RAID motherboard (bios dated 7/11/02) with 4 harddrives off
of Highpoint RAID controller and DVD burner off of VIA IDE controller.
Athlon 1800XP processor
512megs PC 133 SDRAM
2X20Gig IBM drives in a RAID 0 (C and D partitions) setup as a dynamic
disk
2X15Gig WD drives in a RAID 0 (F partition originally) setup as a
dynamic disk
E: drive is a Sony DRU-500A DVD writer
Gainward NVIDIA TI-4200 based video card
SB Audigy sound card
Netgear FA310TX nic
Software:
MS Windows XP Pro with SP1 and latest critical updates
System Restore turned off now (unfortunately)
Volume Shadow Service NOT started
Latest NVIDIA and VIA 4 in 1 drivers
Nothing on the system changed within 2 days of this problem starting.
I hadn't installed anything new in the prior 2 days.
I consider myself to be VERY advanced in windows troubleshooting, but
this one has me stumped and frustrated. I am typing this message on
this system so the problem isn't fatal, but its bothering me, and I
was hoping someone could help me with this.
Thanks,
Sean Cullinan
I have one that I've NEVER seen before in my extensive
troubleshooting, and was hoping someone could help. Yesterday I came
home from work and my machine had rebooted itself. Not sure what
happened but it was at the login screen and when I left it was locked.
When I logged in I got a "Found New Hardware" display and a msgbox
prompting me to reboot. I immediately said "No" because I wanted to
see what was being installed. There was nothing in the device
manager. I also started getting all kinds of filesystem corruption
messages...mostly about system restore files being corrupted. I went
ahead and rebooted, and when I did the system would not come back up
due to disk corruption. I had to put in the XP disk and do a chkdsk
/R from the recovery console which did seem to fix the corruption, but
when I got back into windows all of my drives had two letters
associated with them. My c: drive was also available on G:, my D: on
H: and my F: on I:. Other than that the system seemed okay.
I went into device manager and only saw the 3 volumes (c:, d:, and
f
, and in disk management there was no other drive letters listedother than c: d: and f:. It did however, not let me select g, h or i
if I wanted to "change" a drive letter which makes sense because I
think it queries explorer to enumerate the available drives.
I decided to play a bit to try to fix this (after backing up
everything) and found some interestin stuff out. My "f:" drive was
expendable so I decided to see what would happen if I formatted the I:
drive. To my surprise the I: drive formatted giving me 28 gigs of
free space, but the f: drive still had its contents on it. Hey what a
feature...I just got a free 28 gigs of space! Seriously, I cannot
explain this but it is not right. I then went into disk management
and completely removed this volume. Oddly while the f: drive
disappeared, my I: drive was still available. I then physically
removed the drives from the system (the f: drive was 2 15 gigs in a
raid 0 on a highpoint ata 100 raid controller) and when I got back
into windows I removed the dynamic disk from disk management and the
I: drive finally disappeared, the g: ghost drive became the f: ghost
drive and the h: ghost drive became the g: ghost drive. I then added
the disks back and before I even was able to reimport the disk in disk
management it popped back into explorer as the h: drive now. When I
re-added it in disk management (had to choose I: drive) I was back to
step one.
I decided that the registry may be the next place to poke around in so
I headed there. I messed around in hkey_local_machine/system/Mounted
devices where I saw the extra entries (DOSDevices/G: etc). I also
checked out hkey_current_user/software/microsoft/windows/currentversion/explorer/MountPoints2
and deleted the extraneous keys in there. I basically removed
EVERYTHING I could in the registry that looked extraneous and yet no
matter what I did the drives appeared. Its like its autodetecting
their presence.
Here are the specs of my system:
Hardware:
ABIT KT7A-RAID motherboard (bios dated 7/11/02) with 4 harddrives off
of Highpoint RAID controller and DVD burner off of VIA IDE controller.
Athlon 1800XP processor
512megs PC 133 SDRAM
2X20Gig IBM drives in a RAID 0 (C and D partitions) setup as a dynamic
disk
2X15Gig WD drives in a RAID 0 (F partition originally) setup as a
dynamic disk
E: drive is a Sony DRU-500A DVD writer
Gainward NVIDIA TI-4200 based video card
SB Audigy sound card
Netgear FA310TX nic
Software:
MS Windows XP Pro with SP1 and latest critical updates
System Restore turned off now (unfortunately)
Volume Shadow Service NOT started
Latest NVIDIA and VIA 4 in 1 drivers
Nothing on the system changed within 2 days of this problem starting.
I hadn't installed anything new in the prior 2 days.
I consider myself to be VERY advanced in windows troubleshooting, but
this one has me stumped and frustrated. I am typing this message on
this system so the problem isn't fatal, but its bothering me, and I
was hoping someone could help me with this.
Thanks,
Sean Cullinan