T
taylok2
Alright, this is quite a strange puzzle, and it's been going on for a
while. My wide searches of the KB and usenet have proved fruitless. I'm
pretty sure I've ruled out physical defects, viruses, or malware. It
seems to me that I have some really funky inconsistancy with the disk
data structures that's completely confusing chkdsk, fixmbr, and
friends.
Here's the background information:
I'm using windows2000 SP4 with all the latest critical patches applied.
I have an old ASUS A7V mobo, rev 1.01., with updated firmware (1011)
and drivers. The hard disk (an 80 GB Maxtor -- pretty recent -- shows
up as "4D080H4") is usually plugged into the promise Ultra ATA 133
controller as the only hard drive (the promise controller has updated
drivers (b42) as well), though I switch it to the standard ATA
controller when booting from the win2k disk (to get into recovery
console) because the promise drivers don't seem to work as "3rd party
SCSI drivers" when it asks you to load them. My win2k disk is SP2, so
the recovery console is using SP2 versions of things, in case that's
important.
There is only one partition on the hard disk -- the 80 GB NTFS that I'm
using for win2k. There are no other hard disks in my system.
I'm not sure when this problem first started, but the first time I
remember it giving me the inaccessible boot device error was after
flashing my DVD burner's flash memory (My burner is a BTC IDE1004
internal, the only device on the first standard ATA controller)
Here are the symptoms:
1) every once in a while, while windows is booting, I'll get an
inaccessible boot device blue-screen. The solution is to boot to the
recovery console and do chkdsk. It doesn't happen every time I reboot,
but I don't reboot much, so it's hard to keep track.
2) Doing chkdsk in the recovery console prints, pretty quickly,
"performing additional checking or recovery" three times, then when
it's done doing the rest of its scan (which takes a few minutes) it
tells me that there were errors that it fixed.
3) HOWEVER, if I do chkdsk again, even after rebooting, it does the
SAME EXACT THING -- prints 3x that it was doing "additional checking or
recovery" and tells me that it fixed errors. Well obviously it *didn't*
fix the errors.
4) FixMBR tells me that the partition table was invalid or nonstandard
(it should be standard), so I tell it to overwrite it, and it's
successful.
5) HOWEVER, if I do FixMBR again, even after rebooting, it does the
SAME EXACT THING. Apparently FixMBR can't fix my errors, either.
6) After doing this chkdisk dance (it DOES fix the blue screen issue
when it comes up), ALL THE SECURITY DESCRIPTORS ON MY HARD DRIVE ARE
RESET TO DEFAULT. Oy. Annoying, but not the end of the world since I
only use the system as a single-administrator-user.
7) If I do chkdsk while in windows it tells me "CHKDSK discovered free
space marked as allocated in the master file table (MFT) bitmap" and
"CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in the volume bitmap"
but nothing else.
8) The built-in windows defragmenter shows TWO copies of my 80 GB
partition, one as an "unmounted volume." However, diskpart and friends
only show the one partition when in the recovery console.
ONCE when I did a reboot-chkdsk (not recovery console), it seemed to
find hundreds of invalid security descriptors and replaced them with
the default ones. This was after the first time the blue screen
happened to me. But I seem to recall seeing the "files suddenly having
default descriptors" occuring before that (but since I'm an
administrator anyway, it took me a while to realize it was a problem).
This hundreds-of-descriptors-replaced-during-chkdsk hasn't happened
again.
So... yeah. Strange, huh? I don't think any other data on my disk has
gotten corrupted because of all this, but it does bother me. And the
occasional booting blue screen is annoying as hell. I've done virus and
malware scans and turned up nothing (plus, there definitely is a
problem beyond a virus if chkdsk and fixmbr find and fix the same
problems over and over when doing nothing in between except perhaps
booting back into the recovery console). Surface scans of the disk seem
fine and I haven't gotten any other problems that would point to a bad
disk (eg sector read and write errors).
As I said, I can't seem to find anything to help me online. Does any
NTFS guru out there have any idea what might be wrong and what I can do
to fix it?
Thanks!
Ken
while. My wide searches of the KB and usenet have proved fruitless. I'm
pretty sure I've ruled out physical defects, viruses, or malware. It
seems to me that I have some really funky inconsistancy with the disk
data structures that's completely confusing chkdsk, fixmbr, and
friends.
Here's the background information:
I'm using windows2000 SP4 with all the latest critical patches applied.
I have an old ASUS A7V mobo, rev 1.01., with updated firmware (1011)
and drivers. The hard disk (an 80 GB Maxtor -- pretty recent -- shows
up as "4D080H4") is usually plugged into the promise Ultra ATA 133
controller as the only hard drive (the promise controller has updated
drivers (b42) as well), though I switch it to the standard ATA
controller when booting from the win2k disk (to get into recovery
console) because the promise drivers don't seem to work as "3rd party
SCSI drivers" when it asks you to load them. My win2k disk is SP2, so
the recovery console is using SP2 versions of things, in case that's
important.
There is only one partition on the hard disk -- the 80 GB NTFS that I'm
using for win2k. There are no other hard disks in my system.
I'm not sure when this problem first started, but the first time I
remember it giving me the inaccessible boot device error was after
flashing my DVD burner's flash memory (My burner is a BTC IDE1004
internal, the only device on the first standard ATA controller)
Here are the symptoms:
1) every once in a while, while windows is booting, I'll get an
inaccessible boot device blue-screen. The solution is to boot to the
recovery console and do chkdsk. It doesn't happen every time I reboot,
but I don't reboot much, so it's hard to keep track.
2) Doing chkdsk in the recovery console prints, pretty quickly,
"performing additional checking or recovery" three times, then when
it's done doing the rest of its scan (which takes a few minutes) it
tells me that there were errors that it fixed.
3) HOWEVER, if I do chkdsk again, even after rebooting, it does the
SAME EXACT THING -- prints 3x that it was doing "additional checking or
recovery" and tells me that it fixed errors. Well obviously it *didn't*
fix the errors.
4) FixMBR tells me that the partition table was invalid or nonstandard
(it should be standard), so I tell it to overwrite it, and it's
successful.
5) HOWEVER, if I do FixMBR again, even after rebooting, it does the
SAME EXACT THING. Apparently FixMBR can't fix my errors, either.
6) After doing this chkdisk dance (it DOES fix the blue screen issue
when it comes up), ALL THE SECURITY DESCRIPTORS ON MY HARD DRIVE ARE
RESET TO DEFAULT. Oy. Annoying, but not the end of the world since I
only use the system as a single-administrator-user.
7) If I do chkdsk while in windows it tells me "CHKDSK discovered free
space marked as allocated in the master file table (MFT) bitmap" and
"CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in the volume bitmap"
but nothing else.
8) The built-in windows defragmenter shows TWO copies of my 80 GB
partition, one as an "unmounted volume." However, diskpart and friends
only show the one partition when in the recovery console.
ONCE when I did a reboot-chkdsk (not recovery console), it seemed to
find hundreds of invalid security descriptors and replaced them with
the default ones. This was after the first time the blue screen
happened to me. But I seem to recall seeing the "files suddenly having
default descriptors" occuring before that (but since I'm an
administrator anyway, it took me a while to realize it was a problem).
This hundreds-of-descriptors-replaced-during-chkdsk hasn't happened
again.
So... yeah. Strange, huh? I don't think any other data on my disk has
gotten corrupted because of all this, but it does bother me. And the
occasional booting blue screen is annoying as hell. I've done virus and
malware scans and turned up nothing (plus, there definitely is a
problem beyond a virus if chkdsk and fixmbr find and fix the same
problems over and over when doing nothing in between except perhaps
booting back into the recovery console). Surface scans of the disk seem
fine and I haven't gotten any other problems that would point to a bad
disk (eg sector read and write errors).
As I said, I can't seem to find anything to help me online. Does any
NTFS guru out there have any idea what might be wrong and what I can do
to fix it?
Thanks!
Ken