Spare drive causes Explorer fault

[pazsint]

Installed and cloned a copy of my C drive to a new HDD. The new drive I have booting and working fine, but now when I try to hook up my old one as a secondary master, windows stops loading at the background color and the infamous error 'Explorer has performed and illegal operation...' and the details say explorer has caused an invalid page fault in explorer.exe at 017f...'
On clicking close you just stare at the background, no icons, no start, no windows. On restart, windows does a safe mode and goes to the desktop that way OK. Then if you try again the cycle repeats. When I disconnect this spare drive, thew new drive alone, loads and runs windows OK. I realize at some point I can trash the old/spare, but there is data on different partitions I want, and at least one other whole partition I want to clone to my new drive, BUT don't want to copy any errors or trouble. Besides not sure if I copied some of the trouble to my new drive.
Anyway I have tried a lot of surfing and approaches and am looking for some fresh an expert views...thanks!!
B-)=

http://www.kingofcoin.com

 

[TekTippy4U]

I'm not sure.....but maybe try it......have you gone into Device Manager and enabled Dual IDE Channels Enabled under Hard disk Controllers(usually Bus Master Ide controller)...I think...
also BIOS settings check out.???....set all to auto-detect.??
TT4U


Notification:
These are just "my" thoughts....and should be carefully measured against other opinions....I try very hard to impart correct info at all times.

 

[pazsint]

TT4U...
Thanks,..yes all controllers are set properly and bios settings are on auto. This was setup before as a two drive, primary and secondary masters, but after an RMA, the new drive is now the boot drive. I swapped cables so the spare is secondary master, which was my primary harddrive before. I can get it up in safe mode, but stuck at the explorer error in normal. Again system works fine when I disconnect this secondary/spare drive...Dan

 

[Jontmke]

Have you tried booting into DOS and doing a scandisk on it? Maybe even a surface scan?

Jon

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge. (Bertrand Russell)

 

[pazsint]

Yes, scan disk will complete with perhaps a drive size correction, but on the surface scan windows tries to repair a whole sector of clusters having no data, with 'out of memory error' coming up after about 100 clicks to repair bad clusters. This drive has passed the extensive recertification test by Maxtor, so I'm sure surface is OK , just that windows has done something on the 1st partition of 3, and cannot seem to undo or correct.
I'm Still trying to retrieve my data/drive intact and use it as the secondary master...

 

[TekTippy4U]

Have you tried new cables?..

Notification:
These are just "my" thoughts....and should be carefully measured against other opinions....I try very hard to impart correct info at all times.

 

[Nyg]

Hi

To pazsint

In the bios take the auto detect hardrive off Auto and set the drives manually to the correct master and slave settings.

Check the hard drive jumpers also as you may still have the old drive set to master.

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2 heads are better than 1, but 1 is better than a commitee.

 

[pazsint]

Guys.. your not trying....the problem drive is a secondary master on its own 80 wire cable thru a Promise ATA card. The new drive is primary master on its own 80 wire cable on the mobo. Cables are good and all jumpers and settings are correct, as this set was run for 9 months this way...the only change was swapped drive positions. And only the 20gig has an active partition. Keep trying..OK... Thanks, Dan

 

[Jontmke]

Well, that is the first time you even mentioned the ATA card. Have you tried eliminating the card from the equation? Put the "bad" drive on the MB IDE and see if it is OK. That will help to determine if maybe the card is flaky.

Jon

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge. (Bertrand Russell)

 

[Nyg]

I agree with Jontmke

If you don't give us the info how can we be expected to help?

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2 heads are better than 1, but 1 is better than a committee.

 

[pazsint]

OK ...also trying for help at another forum, and thought I had that fact here too....the ATA card seems fine, as this 30 gig spare on Promise comes up in safe mode. But when I try to boot the old drive alone on the primary mobo ide as master, it goes to the scan disk loop, 'can't read from last cluster of drive C:\', it completes scan and tries to boot, but will stop before desktop with a 'mprexe has caused an error'. Replaced these files from my WinCD but no good.
Appreciate your questions too so I can provide the needed info.

 

[Jontmke]

OK, try leaving it on the MB IDE. Boot to command prompt only, and run scandisk with a surface test. The command would look like this if your drive is the D: drive. Just enter the drive letter that it shows up as.
At the Prompt type this:
scandisk d: /nosave/autofix/surface

Let it run, maybe even overnight. This should find any bad sectors and mark the FAT file properly.

Jon

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge. (Bertrand Russell)

 

[pazsint]

JON...will try that...but as I recall the surface scan gets to a bad sector near the end of the first partition(C and wants to fix every cluster in there...after 150 or so manual clicks I gave up....some 3500 to do. Is there any way to have the whole area marked off as bad? Also I presume you want me to try it cabled as the primary mobo ide master alone, right?

 

[Jontmke]

It does not matter which IDE.
You have to let scandisk run, there is no other way. It tries each little sector about 6 times before giving up. If you put the /autofix in the command line you will not have to do anything but wait. A loooong time.

Good luck :-(

Jon

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge. (Bertrand Russell)

 

[pazsint]

I have tried to do a thorough surface scan on D: drive cable as a secondary master from the dos prompt. It always says can't read from last cluster of this drive. When scan hits about 85% of D it starts to repair bad clusters, sector after sector, except after numerous tries it never finishes, but halts with the 'out of memory error'. I booted into safe mode one night and let the surface scan go all night and into the next afternoon..it never did finish but got real slow. After 18 hours it had marked off 23 conscecutive sectors of 3660 clusters each but wasn't done. Looks like windows is saying I have physical damage and wants to write off about 4.5 gig of this drive. I have run the latest facotry recertification tests by Maxtor on it, and it passes all of them , so I do not believe this drive is bad nor is there and impending failure.
Fdisk info..Drive 1 primary partition active as C: at 9.8 G, secondary as extended dos E: 9.6 gig: on slave drive 2 primary D: 10.1 Gig part has a status of A, but fdisk says only C: can be active, part F: is 9.7 Gig and G: is 9.5 Gig, both in the extended dos positions. The CRoms and reader are usually G:,H:, and I: assignments.

 

[Nyg]

To pazsint


To run the scandisk without the prompts go to dos prompt and type the following with C: being the drive to scan.

C:scandisk /nosummary/autofix/surface


Hit enter and leave the system over night and all will be marked or repaired.

On my 6g drive which started to detect bad clusters with 100,000 to go on the drive took about 24 hours, I think but can't remember it marked about 200 as bad.


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2 heads are better than 1, but 1 is better than a committee.