Hard drive error

[Don Phillipson]

What signifies this SCANDISK messge ?
(in Phase 1, I think, no later than Phase 2)
"Windows was unable to complete the task"

This is on a Dell-built WinXP(2SP) PC, running
as slow as molasses -- that did not get up to normal
speed when I removed several boot loads, e.g.
Norton and Dell Help Systems -- so I cleared off
junk files with a view to defragging. Then SCANDISK
would not complete.

DOS CHKDSK /F reports
1. Fixed 2 corrupt attribute records.
2. Cannot continue in read-only mode.

What does this mean? Is the OS stuck in what
Win98 would have called DOS compatibility mode?
I should be grateful for advice for
1. diagnosis
2. cure.

 

[PaulM]

Are you running on fat32?

 

[Don Phillipson]

Are you running on fat32?

Thanks for the reminder: I was surprised to see this
Dell PC appears to have two partitions:
one FAT (30 Mb I think) no drive letter, possibly hidden
one NTFS 36 Gb, drive C:\ apparently normal.

I don't see the function of (a) any second drive,
(b) any non-NTFS drive: but perhaps Dell had other
things in mind . . .

 

[Big Al]

Thanks for the reminder: I was surprised to see this
Dell PC appears to have two partitions:
one FAT (30 Mb I think) no drive letter, possibly hidden
one NTFS 36 Gb, drive C:\ apparently normal.

I don't see the function of (a) any second drive,
(b) any non-NTFS drive: but perhaps Dell had other
things in mind . . .

I have a dell inspiron 6000. 2 years + old.
Dell shipped it with a restore utility and all the restore data on the
extra partition. I lost some space.
So I ordered the CD's etc and then reformatted / repartitioned and
claimed all the drive. My logic was that if the drive dies, what good
is the restore. And I only had 80 gig, I want 80 gig. Its bad enough
that format loses some in the overhead.

PS. The CD's dell sent me were the full OEM windows XP Pro SP2 with all
the Dell addon's etc. The nice part was I have the option to no load
some trialware. I like that.

 

[Bill in Co.]

Dell has two hidden FAT partitions, for its recovery and utility programs,
respectively. One of them is FAT32. The other (IIRC) is FAT.