Boot Problems and Data Corruption on Both HDs

[LOKIDOG]

I responded to thread751-1049124 with similar problems, but now am starting a new thread.

I have two Seagate 200 hard drives on my W2K machine. They were installed last year after a mechanical HD crash.

Then I had a software crash about a month and a half ago. I never found the source or reason for the problem. It started with a blue screen of death, and may have been made worse by Norton Goback, installing it and uninstalling it in the recovery process.

Well, I reformatted my drive and recovered data from backups on the old drive.

Then my backup drive started having problems. Chkdsk kept being implemented on startup. Very weird. The last time when I let chkdsk work through, I ended up with scrambled files. I used Getdataback to recover them.

Then in this interim period, when I still was recovering files from my backup disk, and trying to stabilize my main disk, I had problems with my main HD.

This problem started with no NTLDR. I also had no boot.ini (This happended a few times but simply recopying an old boot.ini fixed things) files or NTDETECT.COM file.

I replaced these files, but still was not getting back into Windows, I had another file missing, in the Winnt/system32 folder. But replacing this did not work either.

I booted from the W2K disk and ran the recovery console, and chkdsk was run. This scrambled - or lost a bunch more files on my main drive. So I stopped doing anything with the drive.

I now bought a new 320 G HG and have installed Windows on it. I will then recover data off the old C drive with Getdataback.

Now for the ?

What is happening here?

1. Virus? I ran the latest Norton Virus check and found nothing on any drive (but the file system is messed up so some files are lost on the old C HD) What kind of virus could it be?

2. Could it be some sort of Hardware problem outside of the disks. (besides the power source as mentioned in the thread above). Motherboard stuff. How do I check for this?

3. I may have solved it when installing W2K on my new 320 G drive. I found Windows did not allocate all of the 320 G, only 129 of it. Upon looking into it at the Western Digital site I found this:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;305098.

Upon running the registry editor and entering

Value name: EnableBigLba
Data type: REG_DWORD
Value data: 0x1

I had my 320 G, and after merging partitions with partition magic I had it all on C.

According to MS "Operating systems that do not have 48-bit LBA support enabled by default (such as Microsoft Windows 98, Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition (Me), or Windows 2000) that are installed on a partition that spans beyond the 28-bit LBA boundary (137GB) will experience data corruption or data loss."

Could this be the key that ties the two HD data corruption issues together?

I honestly don't remember editing the registry when I originally installed my two 200 G drives, but I do remember something about them not showing complete size and having to do something about it (I think I used a Seagate Utility that 'fixed things).

But when I reinstalled Windows after the first crash, I did nothing special - simply started loading software. Maybe the second crash and data corruption resulted from the missing registry entry?

Please help.

 

[caffeinated]

Are you overclocking the machine at all?

The reason I ask is because I have overclocked many of my workstations and Windows will act up at the slightest change if the hardware cannot handle it or if there is a bottleneck somewhere.

Just a thought.

Caffeinated

 

[LOKIDOG]

Thanks Caffeinated! What is and how do I check for overclocking?

The maching ran fine, actually very well for about a year with the two new drives until I had the 2 crashes, so the overclocking would either have to been the result of installing some software or if only a problem with the second crash, a result of not making the proper settings when I reinstalled windows. Does this sound likely (I don't know since I'm not sure what overclocking is)

 

[caffeinated]

LOKIDOG,

Overclocking is a term for running a CPU, video card, or other component faster than its rated speed. The overclocking I was leaning towards was the CPU/RAM, but if you have not gone into the BIOS settings and changed anything related to this, then it is more likely the hard drives. Have you tried running the Seagate tools at

http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/

to see if there are any errors reported?

Caffeinated

 

[LOKIDOG]

I have not tried these utilities this time. I did when I first installed them to help with the installation. I did do checks of the HD's with Norton System Works. But there are not that many parameters involved here. But I found no errors, or bad sectors anywhere on the surface of the disks. I will download the Segate Utilities right away and check the disks as soon as I have Getdataback's File sytems saved.