Pre-boot tasks will not run

[James]

Recently I had a problem with Diskeeper where it would
not run because it said a disk check had been scheduled
to run. Turns out the drive was flagged "dirty", but
Chkdsk would not run on the drive. I tried re-running
Chkdsk c: /f and it would not run at startup. As a
result, no pre-boot processes, such as defrag, would run
at all. I tried rebooting to the Recovery console and
checking the disks, but it said there were "unrecoverable
errors". I backed everything up, repartitioned and
reformatted the drive, then reinstalled XP, and chkdsk
STILL would not run on startup. I have run the
manufacturer's (Dell) diagnostics several times against
the drive with the same effect. I have tried two
different drives in this machine, both freshly
repartitioned and reformatted, with the same effect.
That makes me think "hardware", but if the diags are
coming back clean, the manufacturer isn't going to help
me any. Does anyone have an idea where I can proceed
from here?

 

[Wesley Vogel]

Do you have ZoneAlarm 5 ??

[[Since the new version 5.0 of TrueVector accesses the disk so early in the
boot-sequence, CHKDISK cannot run with the /F option at boot-time, because
it needs to access the disk directly.]]

Uninstall ZA5 and install an earlier version.