"Drive C: is corrupted and cannot be repaired" during install. Plz hlp

[Jumper001]

I have a perfectly working 98SE install on my C: partition and an empty 6GB D: partition ready for XP.

Install proceedes until the drive check phase and then I get "Drive C: is corrupt and cannot be repaired."

WHY?! I did fdisk /mbr 3 times from 98se and scandisk on thorugh comes up with ZIP. Unless theres some weird problem with the mbr/boost sector that XP install doesnt like that I dont know about it there is no reason why it shouldn't work.

This error message is not documented anywhere on the MS website and so far no one has been able to offer me any advice accept "format", which TOTALLY DEFEATS THE PURPOSE OF DUEAL-BOOTING!

 

[Styx]

Please see the multi-boot tutorial at

http://www.pcnineoneone.com

. dual-booting is really for commercial Operating System testers. Otherwise there is no real need to dual-boot.

 

[dilettante]

I have to agree with Styx that you really don't want to do this, or at least not for long. There are lots of reasons: insecurity of FAT partitions, instability, clumsiness of having to dual-install applications, Win 9x is obsolete and unnecessary.

But that doesn't help, does it?

How about:

http://support.microsoft.com/directory/article.asp?ID=KB;EN-US;Q297185

This article suggests you have UDMA disk(s) and the wrong cable or a BIOS that is being agressive about it (this isn't another AMD/VIA board, is it?). Not the same error you're getting, but you might try disabling UDMA while installing.

Or:

Maybe a corrupted boot sector or MBR and partition table. Yeah, I hear you - you did an [tt]fdisk /mbr[/tt] or three. Well /MBR is next to useless except for repairing damage caused by some old-timey viruses. The MBR is now used a lot more fully than it was back in the last century. A lot of "reserved" areas that are now used in the MBR might have unacceptable junk in 'em.

You might have (or have had) a newer virus at some time. Or maybe you used one of those godawful "Software BIOS Extenders" to get around the old hard-drive size limits? These also muck with the MBR and partition table. Some of these accursed products are Ontrack and EZ Drive - but they have their uses (like, if you're running DOS!).

Also:
Once you get XP loaded never use [tt]fdisk /mbr[/tt] or you are asking for serious trouble. Always use Recovery Console and its [tt]fixmbr[/tt] command instead!

But:
You may be hosed, friend. I hope somebody else has a better suggestion than "reformat." My guess is you'll need to zero the MBR and partition table before even that will help.

 

[Jumper001]

My PC is brand new, 1.133ghz AMD T-bird, on a VIA KT266 board. The cable on the UDMA100 HDD is the brand new on installed at the factory. No software BIOS extenders have ever been used.

And, the setup program showed no errors on the 2nd partition on the drive which I just formatted.

No one else has any other better suggestions other then format and MS documentation of this catchall error message is nonexistant (theres prolly 10 or 20 reasons a HDD could be corrupt and uprepairable short of a format). The other thing that makes me mad is that the drive works fine!

My reason for dual booting was to make sure I would be able to work out any of the nasty VIA motherboard problems I keep hearing about.

Maybe I'll just return XP and stick to 98SE anyway if MS cant support it properly.

 

[rewalker]

I had a similar problem when I attempted my first XP install (over Win98se).
I ran Norton Utils 2001 disk doctor, which fixed the initial problem. I retried the XP install, but then it found some *files* that it could not fix. Norton found them (but hadn't just moments before), but couldn't repair them. I had to manually delete the "corrupt" files (note: alot of them were .tmp files) and retry the install several times before I found and cleaned them all. Once I had trudged through that, XP was content and would install. Since then, smooth sailing.