Interrupted Defrag - Now PC will not Boot

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Guest

I have an odd question - a PC we have here was being defragged when the
screensaver came on. The tech tried to clear the screensaver, but to no
avail. Then the tech. rebooted the PC and now the PC will go no further than
the actual BIOS boot screen. In otherwords, no windows.

Has anyone seen this before? In the 12 years I've worked with PC's I've
never run into this particular problem nor ever had a defrag interrupted.
Oops!

Thanks, Jeff
 
Rebooted how ?, w/ the soft reset button. Was the volume that XP is
on formatted NTFS ? I suppose if you interrupt a Defrag and the file
being processed is system critical you could end up with an unbootable
PC. Anytime you abruptly halt a running PC you've got a good chance
of corrupting the drive's contents. But to answer your question - No, I
haven't experienced that type of problem.
 
Because of the Screensaver running (it should have been turned off prior) the
tech was not able to see what particular file was defragging or what area. I
know that the tech tried a soft boot and then eventually unplugged the system
from the wall. Not a good call.

Any more info of course is always helpfull.

Thanks again.
 
Your best bet is System Recovery console boot from CD. First run chkdsk /f
If your very lucky that might resolve it. If not, next try fixmbr and
fixboot. If that still doesn't resolve it, a repair reinstall will be
necessary.
 
Because of the Screensaver running (it should have been turned off prior) the
tech was not able to see what particular file was defragging or what area. I
know that the tech tried a soft boot and then eventually unplugged the system
from the wall. Not a good call.

Any more info of course is always helpfull.

Thanks again.
Click to expand...


The tech should have just left the system alone. The screensaver
activating did not interrupt the defrag process. XP will continue to
defrag in the background with the screen saver running.

The tech when he finally pulled the plug on the system, most likely
then hosed the hard drive at that point. Defrag was probably working
in some system critical area at the time or it may not have. Pulling
the plug on a running system is never a good thing to do. Any time
you do that you risk hosing the drive.

You might be able to get the system up and hopefully still have all
the user files, data etc available by doing a repair install.
 
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