Partitions gets totally currupted.

[Guest]

I have a VERY annoying problem.
Last year I suddenly experienced a complete corruption on my boot-partition.
I formatted and reinstalled the OS. Started to reinstall drivers etc,
when it happened again.

Ok, so it must be something with the drive which is shit.
Replaced the drive, and it was still the same thing.
Since the new drive was much larger than the old one,
and my motherboard a bit older, I switched from using the
onboard-IDE-channel, to a IDE-RAID-controller (which also was
integrated on the motherboard)

Ok, seemed to have solved the problem.
Everything worked fine for a while. But then I felt it was time to upgrade.
So I bought another motherboard, cpu, a quality-memory, and installed
everything again.

This was a week ago. Everything has worked fine. Absolutely lovely.
Fast and smooth. Until... yesterday.

Came home from work. The computer had been online for the last three
days, without any fuzz what so ever. Everything was running fast and nice.

Then... just after I had sat down and shut down some programs, it crashed.
The desktop disappeared, and only a small dialogue was left
"Windows will reboot in 59, 58,57..."
Reason: "Lsass.exe has terminated unexpectedly."

Ok, so a reboot was needed... that's ok...

Not.

When rebooting - NTLDR.EXE was not found.

Ok, so I booted from another disk I had lying around.
A completely fresh win 2000, from the original cd,
no drivers, no nothing. Just a freshly installed partition.

Checked the partition which had not booted:
- a complete disaster.

I could see the directories, but every name was filled with junk-characters.
And I could only see the root-directory, the rest wasn't visible at all.

My hope in a "fast solution" left the room.

But ok, the second partition on the drive was at least ok.
I had one partition from which I boot, and a big one with all the data.

The first one was totally junk, but the second was completely ok.
Ok, so I installed a rescue-program. Scanned the first partition completely,
and saved the content as an image-file on the second partition.

Which was a BIG mistake. Because now the second partition also got corrupted.

So... bottom line... the only thing I have left from my old hardware,
is the graphics-card. That is the only thing which is the same.
Everything else is new.

And the machine worked for four days without any problem what so ever.
If there would be any problem, one would think it shows itself directly.

So... any ideas? My latest idea is if it could be a virus which changes
the FAT's on the drive completely. But then it wouldn't happen with
a completely new-installed OS. Which it did last year.

Ok... one thing which I have come to think about, is that the first partition
was FAT32, and the second NTFS.

Is it possible win2000 screws up with the first partition so badly,
that it also starts to write on parts of the disk, where it shouldn't write?

The first partition is 13GB, and the second 130.

So any "over 30GB FAT32"-problems has been avoided.

I have no idea what could be wrong. After four days of gaming,
downloading, patching, and installing... it suddenly crashes
in such extreme way.

Oh well, I'd be grateful for all kinds of ideas.

/ White.Knight

Ps. I managed to seek through the drive completely, found an older
FAT for the second partition, and saved the most important stuff.
But my mails, bookmarks, and several other important files on the first
partition, is gone.

 

[Joep]

I have a VERY annoying problem.
Last year I suddenly experienced a complete corruption on my boot-partition.
I formatted and reinstalled the OS. Started to reinstall drivers etc,
when it happened again.

Ok, so it must be something with the drive which is shit.
Replaced the drive, and it was still the same thing.
Since the new drive was much larger than the old one,
and my motherboard a bit older, I switched from using the
onboard-IDE-channel, to a IDE-RAID-controller (which also was
integrated on the motherboard)

Ok, seemed to have solved the problem.
Everything worked fine for a while. But then I felt it was time to upgrade.
So I bought another motherboard, cpu, a quality-memory, and installed
everything again.

This was a week ago. Everything has worked fine. Absolutely lovely.
Fast and smooth. Until... yesterday.

Came home from work. The computer had been online for the last three
days, without any fuzz what so ever. Everything was running fast and nice.

Then... just after I had sat down and shut down some programs, it crashed.
The desktop disappeared, and only a small dialogue was left
"Windows will reboot in 59, 58,57..."
Reason: "Lsass.exe has terminated unexpectedly."

Ok, so a reboot was needed... that's ok...

Not.

When rebooting - NTLDR.EXE was not found.

Ok, so I booted from another disk I had lying around.
A completely fresh win 2000, from the original cd,
no drivers, no nothing. Just a freshly installed partition.

Checked the partition which had not booted:
- a complete disaster.

I could see the directories, but every name was filled with junk-characters.
And I could only see the root-directory, the rest wasn't visible at all.

My hope in a "fast solution" left the room.

But ok, the second partition on the drive was at least ok.
I had one partition from which I boot, and a big one with all the data.

The first one was totally junk, but the second was completely ok.
Ok, so I installed a rescue-program. Scanned the first partition completely,
and saved the content as an image-file on the second partition.

Which was a BIG mistake. Because now the second partition also got corrupted.

So... bottom line... the only thing I have left from my old hardware,
is the graphics-card. That is the only thing which is the same.
Everything else is new.

And the machine worked for four days without any problem what so ever.
If there would be any problem, one would think it shows itself directly.

So... any ideas? My latest idea is if it could be a virus which changes
the FAT's on the drive completely. But then it wouldn't happen with
a completely new-installed OS. Which it did last year.

Ok... one thing which I have come to think about, is that the first partition
was FAT32, and the second NTFS.

Is it possible win2000 screws up with the first partition so badly,
that it also starts to write on parts of the disk, where it shouldn't write?

The first partition is 13GB, and the second 130.

So any "over 30GB FAT32"-problems has been avoided.

Yes, but NOT 48 bit LBA addressing issues. They have nothing to do with
partition sizes, but the size of the physical disk. See www.48bitLBA.com for
details. You will need *AND* SP4 *AND* to edit the registry. If not,
anything you write AFTER LBA address 268,435,456 will be written to the
start of the disk (corrupting what's there).

Joep


--
D I Y D a t a R e c o v e r y . N L - Data & Disaster Recovery Tools

http://www.diydatarecovery.nl
http://www.diydatarecovery.com

Please include previous correspondence!

 

[Guest]

That's it.
Great... that solves the whole mystery.

Now I only have to consider if I wish to (in my opinion) downgrade to XP,
or buy myself a "w2k with sp4 integrated from start"-licence...

Well, big thanks Joep.

 

[Joep]

That's it.
Great... that solves the whole mystery.

Now I only have to consider if I wish to (in my opinion) downgrade to XP,
or buy myself a "w2k with sp4 integrated from start"-licence...

.... My mistake, it needs to be SP3. Remember that apart from that you need
to edit the registry (I bet on 48bitlba.com you will find tools that will do
that for you).

Kind regards,
Joep

 

[Pit - Pietro Lonati]

I have a VERY annoying problem.....cut...

Thanks in advance for any help, what do you think about a similar problem on
a HD maxtor 120 GB capacity? Formatted NTFS?

It's not beyond the 137 GB limit, but I'm having the same problem, not so
frequently, but always after using a cleaning software to erase data from
free space and after that defragmenting the HD. I've done this mistake for
the second time in two years after upgrading the cleaning software, and the
result is the same: lsass.exe gives an error message, the system reboots and
doesn't read the HD anymore. I've tried some recovery hints, but the only
thing to do seems to be reformatting the drive.

The OS is win2000 pro regularly updated.

Do you think it's possible to recover the system without reformatting the
HD? The data are safe on the second HD, but reinstalling all the software is
a nightmare....

Thanks for any help.

Pietro