Re: SP2 Installation Problem

From: Barry Watzman (WatzmanNOSPAM_at_neo.rr.com)
Date: 08/22/04 

Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2004 23:15:34 -0400
To: Barry Watzman <WatzmanNOSPAM@neo.rr.com>

I will try that, but I have little expectation of success.

Chkdsk/r locates bad sectors -- does a scan of the hard drive.

Problem is, that while with classic drives this might have done
something, with modern IDE drives, Windows will never see a bad sector
until the drive is failing catastrophically.

With modern IDE drives, what windows sees, until the drive is
catastrophically dying, is a "logical" or "virtual" drive that is always
perfect. If there are problems with a sector, the drive handles them
internally through "defect reallocation" -- the "bad" sector is so
marked bad (usually when it's still readable with retrys) and never used
again, and the data is moved to a spare good sector, in a different
place on the drive, all transparent to Windows. Windows will virtually
never see any problems at all until the drive is close to catastrophic
failure, and usually LONG after S.M.A.R.T. has been reporting errors and
impending drive failure.

Barry Watzman wrote:

> Well, originally this computer had an 80 gig drive with one FAT
> partition (36MB, hidden, some type of diagnostic), and one essentially
> 80 gig partition. Partition Magic was used to resize the partition to
> 40 gigs, and a new 2nd 40 gig partition was created. I think that the
> Partition Magic operation had something to do with it.
>
> If we run CHKDSK from within Windows, it reports errors, doesn't give
> any details at all about the type of errors, and says to run Chkdsk
> during boot. When we do that (/F), it seems to check the disk but
> neither report errors nor fix anything.
>
> But clearly, something is not right, although the system MOSTLY works ok
> (Not withstanding the "Corrupt or inaccesible file: C:\$Mft" warning in
> the system tray when attempting to install SP2).
>
> Unless someone has a better idea, two things that I'm considering are:
>
> -Wipe the entire partition and reinstall from scratch
> -Convert the partition (32 gigs) to FAT32 with Part. Magic
>
>
> Carey Frisch [MVP] wrote:
>
>> The problem you are experiencing is totally unrelated
>> to SP2. For a possible solution, please read:
>> http://forum.gladiator-antivirus.com/index.php?showtopic=10769
>>
>> I would suggest performing the following maintenance prior to
>> installing SP2:
>>
>> Description of the Disk Cleanup Tool in Windows XP
>> http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;310312&Product=winxp
>>
>>
>> How to Perform Disk Error Checking in Windows XP
>> http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;315265&Product=winxp
>>
>>
>> HOW TO: Analyze and Defragment a Disk in Windows XP
>> http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;305781&Product=winxp
>>
>>
>

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