Bootup oddity (problem)

[Gustavus]

I am running Windows XP with SP 2 installed. So far as I can tell the system is working OK -- no BSOD, no freezes, no spurious reboots etc. Recently however a strange this has been occuring during bootup. I shut the machine down the same way I always have; clicking on Start, then on Turn off the computer and in the shutdown box that pops up clicking on either Turn Off or Restart. The machine goes through the same sequence of turn off steps it always has, saying it is saving my personal settings, and then that Windows is shutting down. So far as I can tell -- and I have down this many hundreds of times -- the shut down process is exactly as it has always bee. But on boot up right after the first Windows splash screen (the one with the moving progress bar at the bottom) appears, a blue screen appears saying Windows was shut down improperly the last time and that one of the drives needs to be scanned for consistency etc. It is always the D drive. Chkdsk runs quickly, finds no errors and then the bootup proceeds to completion.

I am mystified by this behavior. It is only a minor annoyance since the chkdsk operation only delays bootup a short time, but I would loke to know why such odd behavior is ocurring.

Any of you have any ideas?

Thanks for your help.

PS
"loke" must have been an unconscious double spoonerism (like and love became loke). Either word will do. I would like and I would love to know what is going on

 

[sieistganzfett]

what is the D: drive? is it a flash drive? or something else that is using the FAT file system? if so, that is exactly why you see it doing a checkdisk.

 

[Gustavus]

Thanks for the reply. No, the physical drive 0 is a 160 GB Seagate partitioned into a 40 GB C drive for the OS and essential programs and the other 120 GB is the D drive (archive) that is used to store downloads etc. Very simple arrangement. The drive is on the primary IDE socket on the ABIT TH7 II motherboard. Neither partition is very full and various disk utilities find nothing wrong with the drives. Both C and D are NTFS partitions.

 

[sieistganzfett]

what if you were to goto the properties for the D: drive->tools tab-> error checking's "check now" to do a checkdisk on the drive, and check both options "automatically fix file system errors" and "scan for and attemp recovery of bad sectors" or probably even better, if you were to boot of the xp cd and do a chkdsk /p to check the d: drive even if the drive isn't marked as "dirty." has anything been installed around the time this problem started?

you mentioned that various disk utilities found nothing wrong, what kind of utilities did you run btw?

 

[redbeard1]

This is a tool from MS. It is supposed to close your registry before the system shuts down. I have used it a few times to clear up errors in the users event logs saying that the registry was not closed before the system rebooted. Its worth a try.

MS hive cleanup service