Experienced advice on disk errors please?

[Chrissirhc]

I have disk errors with scandisk. It will say that partitions boot areas are reporting the incorrect drive size after succesful repair. The scandisk log says
for example:
Drive System (C contained the following errors:

The drive contained an error in its FSInfoSector.
Resolution: Repair the error
Results: Error was corrected as specified above.

This errors occurs frequently say a few times a week. A reasonable argument could be that my computer is not shutting down properly. Therefore the harddrive cache is not getting written to the drive (partition) perhaps the bootarea or (FSInfoSector, if they are the same thing) is always in the cache for harddrives and this not writting is happening when the computer crashes or shuts down. When I solve (if) this problem. If someone else posts a similar message I will be able to offer advice from my experience in a similar situation(not to say the problem will be the same neccessarily). I have posted many times in many forums about my errors but most people just say to re-format the hard drive I strongly do not want to do this unless its absolutely necessay and am looking for experienced advice on my matter or extremely logical reasoning to my problem.

I thank you in advance
(You can probably tell that this problem is really beggining to annoy me).
Ironically it has not caused any data corruption to my knowledge, but I have had the problem for a few months. I would really like to know if this problem is serious.

Chris

 

[butchrecon]

My question is do you have an Anti-Virus installed? Is it updated? Have you done a system scan?.
Have you run a diagnostic program on the Hard Drive?
It is also possible that the hard drive is bad. It could have bad sectors on or near the Master boot record. In either case you do not need to format and reinstall. If its a virus you need a an Anti-Virus boot disk and clean the infected dirve. If its a bad Hard Drive, You can use Norton Ghost and transfer the entire contents of the bad drive to a new one then send the bad drive in for repair to the manufacturer.
Hope this helps

Jim

 

[Chrissirhc]

Okay I am running Dr solomons. I updated it a couple of weeks back and it did not find any viruses. I ran the IBM diagnostic program even in advanced and it said my drive was fine.

Thanks any other ideas?

 

[butchrecon]

Sorry. The many times I ran into an issue like this it was usually a virus or bad drive. Have you tried booting into safe mode then running a complete scandisk? Not sure if it will be much help. Also I would try a third party diagnostic program. Just incase.

 

[Chrissirhc]

Okay I've tried running scandisk in dos safe mode. I didn't realise you could run it in safe mode from my recollition it says that you shouldn't. But I will check again. As for a third party hard drive diagnostic what do you recommend?

 

[butchrecon]

Safe mode was designed for troubleshooting problems. Safe mode is really not much diff. than regular windows mode except that it loads just the bare minimum drivers,vxd,dll,and such so you can fix what ails it.
As for third party diags. I use a program called trouble shooter. Works great at identifying bad hard drives. But there are literally thousands out there. Email me @ butchrecon@skyenet.net and I will email you a good one.
The last thing you can do is to reinstall windows OVER the current one. NO Formatting! IF that does not work I am ut of ideas. As I stated before the the last time I ran into this it was a virus.

 

[mhughes]

You can also run "SFC" and let windows tell you if files are corrupt.

 

[Guest_imported]

Are you using a Geforce graphics card which uses Nvidia drivers?
I had the same problem and updated the Nvidia drivers from version 6.31 to version 6.50 and this fixed the problem.
Apparently this is a known problem with Windows ME and certain Nvidia drivers.