routine chkdsk hangs at step 4 of 5, 71%

[Barbara Clark]

I let this run overnight for several nights, each time allowing it to
run longer. It is on root drive (c) so it has to run on reboot. Its
not just scanning a large file...its hung. C is a 320 GB NTFS drive.

I'm on XP/SP3, Intel motherboard D915GAV, all updates current. Power
supply is ample so it is not a power issue. No recent hardware
changes, and can't think of any events I did to correlate with this. I
had a few glitches on startup where the mouse cursor would not move,
but reboots seemed to bypass so I decided time for chkdsk. Might not
be related.

Seems like the web shows failures at a magic 71% a lot but I've not
seen anything which shows an organized analysis to id the root of any
of them....just things to try to get past it.

I have 3GB of ram. System has 2 320 GB drives, one I use for backup of
data. Installing all of the apps again is a multi-day job so I avoid
it as much as possible.

Thanks in advance for your help
Barb

P.S.
Also, once a chkdsk has been scheduled to run at reboot and if it does
not complete, what is the best way to terminate it so I can go into
safe mode or get the OS back to do more diagnostics?

 

[John Wunderlich]

:

I let this run overnight for several nights, each time allowing it
to run longer. It is on root drive (c) so it has to run on reboot.
Its not just scanning a large file...its hung. C is a 320 GB NTFS
drive.

I'm on XP/SP3, Intel motherboard D915GAV, all updates current.
Power supply is ample so it is not a power issue. No recent
hardware changes, and can't think of any events I did to correlate
with this. I had a few glitches on startup where the mouse cursor
would not move, but reboots seemed to bypass so I decided time for
chkdsk. Might not be related.

Seems like the web shows failures at a magic 71% a lot but I've
not seen anything which shows an organized analysis to id the root
of any of them....just things to try to get past it.

I have 3GB of ram. System has 2 320 GB drives, one I use for
backup of data. Installing all of the apps again is a multi-day
job so I avoid it as much as possible.

Thanks in advance for your help
Barb

P.S.
Also, once a chkdsk has been scheduled to run at reboot and if it
does not complete, what is the best way to terminate it so I can
go into safe mode or get the OS back to do more diagnostics?

This is an indication of chkdsk finding a bad area of disk that it
simply cannot repair. Often continuing will cause it to make some bad
guesses and overwrite good data. The only way to recover is to do a
full reformat of the hard drive and reinstall Windows. The format
operation will detect and map-out bad sectors it discovers. Make sure
you do a Full format and not a "Quick" format. It may be that the disk
is going bad, in which case problems may surface after reinstallation.

Usually when you reboot, Windows gives you a couple of seconds to hit
any key to stop the disk check. If this doesn't work, you will need to
boot from a system on CD to back up what data you can. My CD of
preference is a free Live Linux CD such as Knoppix, although other
choices include "Bart PE" or "Ultimate Boot CD for Windows"

Knoppix: <http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html>

HTH,
John