[Win 98SE] hard drive gone nuts/making me crazy

[1MT]

Yes, I know that the title is not very informative, but I am at the crazy/frustrated stage at this point. I just don't know what to think or what to do.

I guess I will start with symptoms, and refer to the fact that this started happening after I restored an old registry. I think the registry was 6 months old. I restored it because I was trying to do the free virus scan on symantic's webpage, and it kept telling me that I didn't have active X/scripting enabled...when I did. So, I figured restoring the registry might fix the problem.

My first problem occurred while re-installing service pack 6.1 for IE. When I rebooted I got an error message at boot telling me that "windows could not update the file"...and then there was a huge blank space with nothing there, but it booted on to windows and everything seemed fine.

This past week, here is an abbreviated list of what I have encountered. I have gotten error messages that "VXD.dll is corrupted", "General Failure reading Drive C", "Himem.sys is missing or corrupted", "Emm386 is missing or corrupted", "Scandisk encountered a data error while reading the FAT on drive C" These errors come at boot and seem to be completely random. I booted up yesterday and my boot record was missing. Luckily I had the ultimate boot disk and restored it.

But today something else started happening...at boot it showed the drive as garbage characters and beeped twice. I got to safe mode and it told me that my registry was corrupted, but I ran scanreg and it said it was fine. So I rebooted and got "VMM.vxd is corrupted" you will have to run Windows setup again. So I rebooted again, I ran fixreg and I was able to boot into windows finally. I also had to restore the master boot record.

So, my question is this. Does this point to a bad hard drive or just a really screwed up registry? The kicker is that right before all this happened and after I had restored the previous registry, I ran scandisk and defrag and no errors were found at all...then all this starts happening.

If it's the registry what is with the screwed up symbols for the hard drive, and sometimes it doesn't detect the hard drive's size.

I have a lot of stuff on this drive. If it's a bad drive then I have no problem with "hopefully getting it to boot" and cloning it. But if it's a screwed up registry, buying a new drive is a waste of time.

It took me over an hour to get my drive to boot today. I kept getting "general failure reading drive C". Also, the drive would randomly come up as gibberish at boot.

What do you guys think? I'm just trying to figure out what to do. I have my A+ and everything, but the behavior of this is just making me feel dumb. I just don't know how to proceed.

One other thing...this is a WD 120 gig drive and I was able to successfully run the diagnostic software that came with it, and it said the drive was fine. I just don't know what else to do.

Thank You
1mt

 

[edfair]

You very well could have memory problems. Could explain much of the wierdness.
Registry errors that come and go are almost automatically blamed on memory.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[1MT]

Hmm, ok something I neglected to say now that you brought that up.

I have a Trios 2 connected to my motherboard.
I have 3 hard drives and all of them are set to cable select and with this I can choose which to boot too.

I have had no problems with the other 2 drives booting. The OS's on them are Win2k and Win XP home. Of course I have not booted them as much as I have this 98 drive, but if I switch to one of those drives to boot too, it boots fine with no wierd messages at all.

And would bad memory cause the garbage readout of the hard drive name. It's only that that comes up as garbage. It just seems the problem is isolated to this drive.

1MT

 

[TekTippy4U]

The drive showing up as gibberish sounds like maybe a boot sector virus?(it occurs during POST, right?)..
Try and get AVG free AV at

http://www.grisoft.com/us/us_dwnl_free.php

also read this

http://users.iafrica.com/c/cq/cquirke/virtest.htm

and after virus free....
Start>Run SFC
(use the Extraction tools)
to restore your original Vmm32.vxd file from 98SE CD if possible

Also
Start>Run MSCONFIG
check your statements in Config.sys and Autoexec.bat...and even System.ini for possible mis-matched/conflicts loading of.....
Do you have these statements?
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\HIMEM.SYS (has to be first statement)
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE
DOS=HIGH,UMB

Speaking to the ActiveX/scripting issue....it's very possible that you have an "integrated browser" such as I do
...look at this reg key to see
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings
UserAgent=Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Win32)
I have had Netscape installed(came bundled w/software)...and it has it's "own" security settings...so you'd have to open the browser and change them there also.

Hopefully you haven't updated your BIOS in between the 6 month's of diff Registry's...or other major system changes(like Drive Overlay software ala PartitionMagic or Ontrack, or even compression) that could be contributing (just stabbing at straws here).

Consider your C-MOS Boot Sector Anti-virus settings when going thru procedures.....

Hopefully some of this info is helpful...


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.

 

[1MT]

Ok, I did some of the stuff you mentioned. I downloaded that virus software and ran it on my drive and my boot floppy and found no viruses.

I ran the file checker and nothing came up as corrupted.

I went into config.sys and unchecked himem.sys and emm386.

As far as the browser, I just went to the website and it wouldn't work one random day. I had done nothing to the settings, that is why I tried to restore a registry to get that to work.

Here is the thing...I keep fooling with the drive and rebooting it and rebooting it and eventually I will get no errors and it boots to windows and acts like nothing is wrong. I can write to the drive and get no errors. It's just at boot.

Sometimes the drive will show up, but it has no information about the size, and sometimes I just get a string of garbage characters that take up 2 lines.

Also, I have Norton Systemworks and booted with the CD one or two times and ran the virus scan and it found nothing.

Some other stuff I have tried. I remember hearing some "popping" noises coming from the drive last week and it seemed to lose power during those. I unplugged the other drives thinking it is a power issue, but it didn't affect the errors. It's only done that popping sound once.

Oh, and one time in windows I got a blue screen "could not write to drive C" error. Then when I tried to reboot it would not and I got a lot of these error messages. After about 30 minutes it just booted as if nothing had happened.

1MT

 

[TekTippy4U]

Here is the thing...I keep fooling with the drive and rebooting it and rebooting it and eventually I will get no errors and it boots to windows and acts like nothing is wrong. I can write to the drive and get no errors. It's just at boot.

It almost sounds like what Setup would do when it crashes and would create a detlog.txt, detlog.old and detcrash.log
to bypass the problem on reboot....

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/tr...net/prodtechnol/win98/reskit/part1/wrkc05.asp

The above article also refers to your monolthic Vmm32.vxd file that may need replacing thru SFC(or the extract command)....(If you don't have CD, you may have the .cab files on HDD, possibly in C:\Windows\Options)(The SFC needs a "good" set to compare to in Helpdesk, and since you've "replaced" the orig REG, you're not comparing it to a "good" REG...In SFC, click "settings" and then search criteria and you'll see not all important files/folders/file types are backed up by default).....Read this

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/tr...net/prodtechnol/win98/reskit/part5/wrkc27.asp

Scroll down page about 1/3 the way..

Also may help to boot from Bootlog.txt from Win98 Startup menu and review the file for problems.

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.

 

[mainegeek]

Uninstall Nortons System Works completely (if it is installed) then reboot. Also try booting 98 in safe mode and see how the pc runs.

 

[1MT]

Update:

Well, today I went to boot the computer and guess what, it didn't boot again. But this time I didn't have as many different problems. And it only took me about 30 minutes to eventually get it to boot.

The first time I booted it seemed like it was going to come up, but when it got to where the windows loading screen should be, I just got a black screen with a blinking cursor and zero hard drive activity.

Then I rebooted it and it skipped completely to trying to find the boot record from the CD-ROM, rebooted again and it did the same thing...but this time the drive was not even listed. I attempted an autodetect and it could not find the drive. I used the Ultimate Bootdisk and tried to restore the bootrecord. That would not work.

I opened up the case to see if the hard drive was actually running. I swapped out the power connectors and unplugged the ribbon cable. Swapping power connectors made no change it still didn't see the drive. I unplugged the ribbon cable again and plugged in the original power connector...the drive was spinning.

I went into autodetect and it found the drive, but the boot record was still missing. I was able to restore it from the Ultimate Boot Disk and I am using that drive right now to write this message.

Regardless, I think maybe the ribbon cable or the drive itself might be bad. This is the first time it has not detected at all. Symptoms seem to be getting worse. While it's up, I am backing stuff up to CD just in case.

1mt

 

[1MT]

I think it's fixed.

Let me tell you guys...I think it was the ribbon cable the whole time. I have the Trios 2, and I replaced the ribbon cable that came with it, with another one I had, and I have had no problems ever since.

I guess hardware is the first thing to check.

Thanks for your help guys, and file these symptoms under check ribbon cable first.

1MT

 

[edfair]

What kind of ribbon cable? You might have replaced a problem part with a ticking time bomb. Where the next failure may be harder to locate or corrupts data.
Assumption is that you are using 80 conductor cable. And that it is now routed clear of other cables.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[mainegeek]

Hello 1MT,
You said
"this started happening after I restored an old registry"

I would suggest this:

1. Save any important data to CD.
2. Put the original ribbon cable back in noting the orientation of the colored edge to pin #1 on the drive and controller.
3. Re-partition, Format and Re-install Windows.