"F:\ is not accessible. The wrong diskette is in the drive."

[sonoferu]

Home built rig, 2 hard drives, dual boot with XP Pro and SUSE 10 which I hardly ever use, a little over 5 years old. Not expert, I had some helping advice on what to get and how to put it together.

Long story of bad things one after the other, still not able to figure out what's happening but it's going south I'm afraid.

I had problems with the video card couple of weeks ago, and then boot problems. Frequent GRUB boot errors started, got to Stage 1.5 and then GRUB Errors seemingly random - one time it would be error 21, then another time 25, then occasional 17 or 18. And sometimes booted right up fine.

Last week I saw one saying a file \$Mft was corrupted with a delayed write failure, something like that.

Then this morning I got the BSOD, saying that PQV2i.sys was bad, later joined by anvioctl.sys. I learned that is likely from Norton Ghost. I have Ghost 9.0 and regularly back up the C drive to the second drive, which is there for just that purpose. I have restored several times when needed, so I have found Ghost a great help.

So I used the Symantec Recovery disk to get in and renamed the sys file, and the reboot was then ok. But the second drive is now sort of dead in Windows Explorer – nothing shows and clicking on it gets “F: is not accessible. The wrong diskette is in the drive.”

Whoa!!!! Just now, while I write, I got the Windows balloon popup from the taskbar saying New Hardware Found, and it said “T380011” - the drives are Seagate ST380011A, 80GB each. I recognized that. And now when I click on it, the F drive says “Not formatted – want to format now?”

So the image that was on it looks like it’s useless by now. But its odd – if the sys files were Norton’s then how does Ghost work now? It seems fine

Should I format it? Is the above part of the reason for the boot fails and the $Mft file error?

Is any of this familiar to anyone? It seems like a swirl of things to wonder about

thanks

 

[sonoferu]

BTW, one of the little details I didnt include was this.

After the message about $Mft began occasionally appearing, and occasionally I saw the F drive NOT showing in the BIOS output at startup, I did chkdsk on F. That went through, took a long time of course, and at the next reboot is when I hit the BSOD.

I would have to think that Norton is involved, if PQV2i.sys is related, and the F drive holds a Ghost image. Something in chkdsk knocked over something of Ghost's on F? And that carried over to messing up the sys file somehow?

A puzzler

 

[RebateMonger]

When unexplained errors occur, the first thiing to do is an overnight Memtest86+ and run one or more disk maker's disk diagnostics program against the hard drives. Run these tests using a boot CD. The images are available on http://memtest.org and on the disk makers' sites.

 

[sonoferu]

OK, thanks.

So the diagnostics of say, chkdsk or Norton's Disk Doctor arent really that effective?

As for a boot CD, I went and got something called Ultimate Boot CD a while ago with the video card problems I was having, spent a long time not getting it to work. Maybe I'm just not experienced enough. Is that one you would recommend?

I have XP Pro because years ago, after I had built my computer and ran Windows 2000 on it, I got a job where they used XP and had a group license, and since I worked from home a lot they wanted me on XP so I got one of the license seats off the group license. I dont have the CD, and I left that job several years ago now. So I'm kind of stuck for booting from anything on hand, unless I use my old personal Windows 2000 CD. Would that do?

 

[Athadeus]

I'm not sure what is on UBCD, but nothing quite suffices for the diagnostics RebateMonger suggested IMO. Once you're sure the memory subsystem and drives are fine, I'd consider finding someone/somewhere to get a system builder XP Pro license and disc from.

Wipe whichever disc doesn't have your remaining data on it and install Windows XP Pro cleanly along with all your updates and drivers. Any continuing problems should be with the motherboard or power supply and could probably be identified by their symptons.

 

[KGB]

SeaTools

 

[sonoferu]

KGBMAN - thx

really KGB? wow

 

[mfenn]

My gut says that your HDD is dying. Run SeaTools to confirm, then RMA if under warranty.

 

[sonoferu]

I got the Seatools but when I ran it, I got the initial little window about scanning for drives and it sat there, eating 30 to 50% of CPU in Task Manager, for a half hour or more. I did it twice.

Any idea on that?

 

[KGB]

The problem is either the HDD, the controller or the cable. Try another cable if you have one.
Chances are your drive is toast.

 

[KGB]

KGBMAN - thx

really KGB? wow

Don't tell anyone...

 

[sonoferu]

toast meaning that if it is toast the Seatools would stall?

And ssshhhhhhh - I wont tell anyone about your badge, TRUST me.

 

[sonoferu]

also does toast mean that formatting it would not work?

 

[kamikazekyle]

You have to think "what caused the need to format in the first place?" Data corruption probably destroyed part of the partition or file system information, leading to Windows asking you to format.

Data corruption on just one drive is probably going to be caused, like KGBMAN said, by a bad disk, controller, or cable. Try using a new copy of the Ultimate Boot CD and use the DOS based SeaTools. Note that a full scan on the drive for bad sectors will take a significant amount of time (hours, possibly). If the scan goes kaput partway through, then that's a controller or cable issue. Quick scans normally take less than half an hour to an hour, though don't do a full physical check on the disk.

You can also check into MHDD, which can bypass damn near everything and operate on your drive at the lowest possible level to help eliminate variables.

If your Windows drive is also throwing up errors, I'm really starting to think your motherboard controller is bad (and/or your cable, if it's an IDE and the drives are on the same cable).

Oh, and since you mention that your video card was giving you issues, I might even be inclined to include the power supply or whole motherboard as a cause. First, however, is to run diags on your hard drive. The two might or might not be related, but rule out other issues first with the drives.

Oh again...the UBCD has Memtest on it to check your RAM as well, just in case.

 

[sonoferu]

OK, I'm back. Christmas was tough, ALL the kids and grandkids came to stay, then I went to visit my Mom and came back to find my wife spilled juice into her laptop -- 2 days on that one.

So no time for this one

But last night I ran memtest86+ and no errors in 14 passes.

And I went ahead and formatted the F drive, seemed no more reason to wait on that. It formatted ok and now the last 4 reboots have gone through without a problem.

Could a disk problem on a slave drive cause reboot failures like that? Seems so, but it puzzles me - I thought all the boot process was from the boot drive

At least I have a feeling I can take my time now on this one, not like the house is on fire any more.

Thanks for all the help

 

[sonoferu]

And now I have run SeaTools against both drives, the Long Generic test, and both passed.

So is that what all this came down to? There was a problem with the second drive, at the same time [by chance] as issues with the video card, and that led to a missing Norton Ghost file and a BSOD, and all the crazy symptoms were just from the second hard drive? If you want to read the whole story [it's kind of long and full of what-the-@$%'s], it's at

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2124685

In any case, if memtest and SeaTools pass [and the video card is new and working fine] then all is good for now?

 

[mfenn]

Should be OK. You might want to swap out the SATA cables for new ones just to be 100% sure.