Hard Drive Corruption

[Mark Petereit]

My PC is not a home-brew, but it's probably about to be! ;-)

I'm using a Dell Dimension 8200 that's about 3 years old. I moved from
Missouri to South Carolina back in October 2005. Since then, my system
has crashed 3 times, all three times due to some kind of hard drive
corruption.

It's the same scenario every time, everything is working fine, no sign
of anything wrong. I have to shut down my system for some reason
(adding hardware, thunderstorm coming, etc.) When I power back on, it
passes BIOS just fine, then I just get a black screen with a blinking
underline text cursor at the top left (not a mouse cursor).

When I use my emergency boot floppy, I get back the message that
C:\Windows\System32\hal.dll is corrupt. If I rebuild that file, it will
fail on another, and another, ad nauseum. Interestingly enough, other
directories and files seem uneffected. Once I rebuild the boot sector,
reinstall windows and my apps, I can access all of my data just fine.
(And yes, I've run PLENTY of full-system virus scans.)

After the first time it happened, I went out and bought a new hard
drive (I needed a larger one anyway). I made the new hard drive the
master and moved the old hard drive to slave. So this issue has
effected two completely different hard drives, twice on the brand new
drive.

Does any of this sound familiar to anyone? Any suggestions?

 

[Chris Hill]

My PC is not a home-brew, but it's probably about to be! ;-)

I'm using a Dell Dimension 8200 that's about 3 years old. I moved from
Missouri to South Carolina back in October 2005. Since then, my system
has crashed 3 times, all three times due to some kind of hard drive
corruption.

It's the same scenario every time, everything is working fine, no sign
of anything wrong. I have to shut down my system for some reason
(adding hardware, thunderstorm coming, etc.) When I power back on, it
passes BIOS just fine, then I just get a black screen with a blinking
underline text cursor at the top left (not a mouse cursor).

When I use my emergency boot floppy, I get back the message that
C:\Windows\System32\hal.dll is corrupt. If I rebuild that file, it will
fail on another, and another, ad nauseum. Interestingly enough, other
directories and files seem uneffected. Once I rebuild the boot sector,
reinstall windows and my apps, I can access all of my data just fine.
(And yes, I've run PLENTY of full-system virus scans.)

After the first time it happened, I went out and bought a new hard
drive (I needed a larger one anyway). I made the new hard drive the
master and moved the old hard drive to slave. So this issue has
effected two completely different hard drives, twice on the brand new
drive.

Likely has nothing to do with your hard drive. Do some searching and
you may find the answer. Everything I've seen so far relates to a
messed up boot.ini which can be easily fixed.

 

[John Doe]

My PC is not a home-brew, but it's probably about to be! ;-)

I'm using a Dell Dimension 8200 that's about 3 years old. I moved
from Missouri to South Carolina back in October 2005. Since then,
my system has crashed 3 times, all three times due to some kind of
hard drive corruption.

It's the same scenario every time, everything is working fine, no
sign of anything wrong. I have to shut down my system for some
reason (adding hardware, thunderstorm coming, etc.) When I power
back on, it passes BIOS just fine, then I just get a black screen
with a blinking underline text cursor at the top left (not a mouse
cursor).

When I use my emergency boot floppy, I get back the message that
C:\Windows\System32\hal.dll is corrupt. If I rebuild that file, it
will fail on another, and another, ad nauseum. Interestingly
enough, other directories and files seem uneffected. Once I
rebuild the boot sector, reinstall windows and my apps, I can
access all of my data just fine. (And yes, I've run PLENTY of
full-system virus scans.)

After the first time it happened, I went out and bought a new hard
drive (I needed a larger one anyway). I made the new hard drive
the master and moved the old hard drive to slave. So this issue
has effected two completely different hard drives, twice on the
brand new drive.

I am a little confused about the sequence of events. I have a
feeling that after the first time it happened, after you bought
another hard drive, the problems were different.

What version of Windows?

What utilities are you using?

How many hard drives are installed?

If you have any important files, be sure they are copied to
removable media now.

Good luck.

 

[John Doe]

On 26 May 2006 08:00:47 -0700, "Mark Petereit"



Likely has nothing to do with your hard drive. Do some searching
and you may find the answer.

I've researched the issue before without finding much useful.

I'm assuming the symptom points to the same cause.

Everything I've seen so far relates to a
messed up boot.ini which can be easily fixed.

I think that's correct. I think it has something to do with multiple
copies of Windows XP, maybe a copy on the other hard drive. I don't
think it happens if you have a single drive and install Windows
without making any copies.

When making a copy of the Windows XP partition now, I keep the
active partition in the first physical location on the disk.

 

[John Weiss]

When I use my emergency boot floppy, I get back the message that
C:\Windows\System32\hal.dll is corrupt. If I rebuild that file, it will
fail on another, and another, ad nauseum. Interestingly enough, other
directories and files seem uneffected. Once I rebuild the boot sector,
reinstall windows and my apps, I can access all of my data just fine.
(And yes, I've run PLENTY of full-system virus scans.)

After the first time it happened, I went out and bought a new hard
drive (I needed a larger one anyway). I made the new hard drive the
master and moved the old hard drive to slave. So this issue has
effected two completely different hard drives, twice on the brand new
drive.

Does any of this sound familiar to anyone? Any suggestions?

What OS are you using? "Emergency boot floppy" sounds like Win9x, in which case
you should make the jump to XP.

The other question is whether you did a proper installation on the new HD. You
should have removed the old HD completely while you did the installation, then
add the old HD as slave after the OS installation was complete. Then, after
copying all your data to the new HD (temporarily, if you will still use it as a
data drive), delete the partitions on the old HD and repartition. I found that
my old computer was very sensitive to having 2 HDs installed, each with an
"active" primary partition. I had numerous problems with it until I
repartitioned the old HD.

Finally, if all the installation stuff is in order, you might have a power
supply problem, with intermittent low voltage screwing things up...

 

[Michael Hawes]

What OS are you using? "Emergency boot floppy" sounds like Win9x, in
which case you should make the jump to XP.

The other question is whether you did a proper installation on the new HD.
You should have removed the old HD completely while you did the
installation, then add the old HD as slave after the OS installation was
complete. Then, after copying all your data to the new HD (temporarily,
if you will still use it as a data drive), delete the partitions on the
old HD and repartition. I found that my old computer was very sensitive
to having 2 HDs installed, each with an "active" primary partition. I had
numerous problems with it until I repartitioned the old HD.

Finally, if all the installation stuff is in order, you might have a power
supply problem, with intermittent low voltage screwing things up...

Run memory diagnostic, int. memory fault can corrupt HD when updated
data is written back.
Mike.

 

[Kent_Diego]

.... due to some kind of hard drive

corruption.

I have seen this several times due to bad RAM. OnceI have a bad IDE cable.

 

[johns]

Sequence sounds weird. If you are going to reinstall Windows,
why do you have to rebuild the boot sector? My experience is
that never works. What I think may have happened here is the
original drive has a physically damaged disk. And if you still
have it in the system, as you boot up, the OS seems determined
to explore both drives doing lord knows what .. and when it
accesses the old drive, the error rate goes through the roof,
and the OS that is loaded corrupts. The error messages you
are getting may be baloney, but if you try to "fix" it, then
you really do get a corrupted OS. Also, another thing ... that
Dell 8200 ( I think ) is the worst computer they ever built. I
think they built it with me in mind. They are impossible to
repair. If you have the one with the weird ram, and you've
tried to up the ram, but bought the wrong size, or the wrong
speed, then the ram pair is mismatched, and that is the
problem.

johns

 

[Don W. McCollough]

My PC is not a home-brew, but it's probably about to be! ;-)

I'm using a Dell Dimension 8200 that's about 3 years old. I moved from
Missouri to South Carolina back in October 2005. Since then, my system
has crashed 3 times, all three times due to some kind of hard drive
corruption.

It's the same scenario every time, everything is working fine, no sign
of anything wrong. I have to shut down my system for some reason
(adding hardware, thunderstorm coming, etc.) When I power back on, it
passes BIOS just fine, then I just get a black screen with a blinking
underline text cursor at the top left (not a mouse cursor).

Could be the motherboard. Likely that if you try another HD it will
go bad also.

Also your power supply could be shot.

 

[Mark Petereit]

Sequence sounds weird. If you are going to reinstall Windows,
why do you have to rebuild the boot sector?

Oops. Sorry. Rebuilding the boot sector was just one of the things I
tried before I ended up reinstalling Windows.

My experience is

that never works. What I think may have happened here is the
original drive has a physically damaged disk. And if you still
have it in the system, as you boot up, the OS seems determined
to explore both drives doing lord knows what .. and when it
accesses the old drive, the error rate goes through the roof,
and the OS that is loaded corrupts. The error messages you
are getting may be baloney, but if you try to "fix" it, then
you really do get a corrupted OS.

You may be onto something there. I did have a Windows 2000 and a
Windows XP installation on the old hard drive. That won't be a problem
going forward, however. I removed everyting OS from the old hard drive
to make room for some files I wanted to save off the new hard drive
before doing a complete low-level format.

Also, another thing ... that
Dell 8200 ( I think ) is the worst computer they ever built.

Yeah. And I bought this for my wife because I was tired of monkeying
with the home-brew box we were using. ;-)

I think they built it with me in mind. They are impossible to
repair. If you have the one with the weird ram, and you've
tried to up the ram, but bought the wrong size, or the wrong
speed, then the ram pair is mismatched, and that is the
problem.

Good grief. You might have another good point there.

In my latest attempt to stabilize this sorry machine, I replaced the
crappy factory power supply with a hopefully less crappy Antec
400-watter. As I was mucking about inside, I did notice that I have two
visibly different banks of RAM installed. I recall upping the RAM
shortly after I bought it, and I did some research before I bought the
new RAM. Still, it wouldn't be a bad idea to double-check and make sure
everything's playing nice.

All that aside, the machine did run for over 2 years without any
issues. I just thought it was mighty coincidental that it failed 3
times in the last 6 months since we moved.

Thanks everyone for all your suggestions! We'll see if the new power
supply, and clean, no-other-OS-directories installation does the trick.

Mark