Re: FAT32 Disk Consistency Check

From: Leonard Severt [MSFT] (leons_at_online.microsoft.com)
Date: 02/12/04 

Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2004 05:41:07 GMT

captmikey@toysoldier.com wrote in
news:rmgl20t3cc1docgsbl2mrjl7aeek2sdok2@4ax.com:

> I've done some Google research on this topic and notice that it
> happens a lot with XP and occassionally with W2K. Can anyone explain
> what is actually going on? What is "Disk Inconsistency"? I hadn't
> seen this message screen until I recently installed Outlook 2002 on my
> machine. I did this because My PDA (iPaq 3970) uses WM2003 OS and
> includes the Outlook 2002 CD for installation on the desktop... so
> these two can sync properly I guess.
>
> I think I saw the black screen message once before in the past year,
> and I just waited and within 20 seconds, it said everything had been
> checked and it booted to the regular Windows desktop. But now it does
> this everytime I reboot and 5 minutes goes by and no progress is being
> shown in checking consistency in the percentage done space. It looks
> more like the machine is frozen, and I have to power down using the
> on-off button on this ThinkPad T21 notebook to get out of the loop.
>
> I used Partition Magic to set up my 40 Gig HDD in this machine, and
> I'm wondering what the pros and cons are of converting the three (3)
> FAT32 partitions or at least the "C" partition to NTFS? That is... if
> that's part of the necessary solution?
>
> I have my drive partitioned into:
>
> C = 10.3 Gigs (IBM Preload 40% used)
> D = 16.5 Gigs (Programs 10% used)
> E = 10.2 Gigs (Data 10% used)
>
> Outside of W2K and few key programs, I'm trying not to bog down the
> root drive partition, and usually install most other programs in "D",
> and store data in "E". Is there anything wrong with this scenario?
>
> Thanks in advance for any/all help.
>
> Mike
>

I don't see a problem with your config. It makes good logic sense to
partition drive as long as you don't do too many partitions. Chkdsk runs
automatically on reboot because the disk subsystem has detected a
read/write error within Windows. It then sets the "dirty bit" which
causes Autocheck to run on reboot. When Autocheck completes it clears
the "dirty bit". I do not know what is causing Autocheck to hang. You do
not want to convert to NTFS until this issue is resolved since part of
the conversion is to run Autocheck on reboot.

I would boot from the Windows 2000 CD and go to Recovery Console. There
run chkdsk /p and see if it completes.

Leonard Severt

Windows 2000 Server Setup Team 

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