Hard drive about to die?

[PenguinGirl]

So, tonight, I'm sitting here happily playing World of Warcraft when the screen freezes. Now, it has been known to do this before. The video card driver decided to get in an infinite loop or something stupid and just froze on me. That driver was reinstalled; since then I've had no problems.

Anyway, back to tonight. I was unable to move my mouse pointer, nothing on the keyboard worked (i.e. Num Lock, etc), so I did a hard reboot.

Once I did that, I popped into the Event Viewer to see what it was that crashed. All that was in there was this lovely gem:

"The file system structure on the disk is corrupt and unusable. Please run the chkdsk utility on the volume C:."

The source is NTFS, category is Disk and Event ID is 55.

I've also begun getting a little pop up bubble in the sys tray that says "C:\$Extend\$ObjId is corrupt and unreadable. Please run the chkdsk utility."

(Note: NONE of this happened before WoW crashed tonight.)



When I was in the Event Viewer, I noticed that there were a LOT (and by a lot I mean 80 from 4:59:05 PM to 4:59:50 PM yesterday afternoon...yes, that many in 45 SECONDS) of these:

"An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk3\D during a paging operation."

Lots of those Saturday afternoon and late evening (early this morning, however you wanna look at it), before and after "the crash". Not really any before then, according to the Event Viewer. I just scanned, but I honestly didn't see any.

So, I tried to do like the suggestion and run chkdsk. Both from the command prompt AND by right clicking on the C: drive in My Computer, going to properties, tools, etc...HOWEVER, once the computer reboots chkdsk does not run.

Well, perhaps I should rephrase.

It DOES run, but it just says that the volume is locked and it can't run. Just like it does while I'm in the command prompt.

Here's what happens when I reboot: The BIOS loads, it tries to boot from the CD drives, then the Windows splash screen loads...then chkdsk tries to run. (I don't mean the 'Welcome' screen, I mean the XP loading screen.) Then after chkdsk tells me it can't run, Windows continues to load normally.

I did try to run chkdsk from the Recovery Console, but the Recovery Console asked me what location of Windows I wanted to run, and the only option it gave me was D:\Windows...and that's not where my OS is loaded. I don't even have a hard drive mapped as D. They are C and F. So I just quit the Recovery Console.


I should probably also put in here that I continued to check the Event Viewer after each reboot, and I have not received that message about the disk being corrupt and unusable again. However, I do continue to receive the little bubble about that $ObjId file being corrupt.

I'm going to bed now, but when I wake up I'm going to d/l Seagate's SeaTools. It's going to be better to run that in DOS, since this is my boot drive, correct?


System specs:
XP Pro
eVGA 680i Motherboard
6600 Dual Core CPU
2GB XMS2 Corsair RAM
GeForce 8800 GTX video card

2 - 320GB Seagate hard drives

AV - Kaspersky 6.0 (full scan completed, nothing found)

Anyone have ideas? Especially as to why chkdsk isn't working AT ALL? Do I need to just chuck this HD out the window and start over?

Help, please. I'm stumped.

 

[alzan]

If possible, you should download the .iso version and make yourself a bootable CD. Run both the Quick and Full versions of the tests against your hard drive. From what you describe, it's most likely dying; but if the tests come back with no failures then you've probably got a borked Windows install.

If you do end up getting a new drive and doing a fresh install, do yourself a favor and do the install in the following fashion; Once Windows is installed, when installing the following, do a reboot after each driver set, even if the install doesn't force a reboot:

Chipset drivers for your motherboard
Video drivers
Audio drivers
Printers, scanners
Games & other Software

As to why CHKDSK isn't running at all: my guess would be that a file that it's dependant upon is corrupt.

Hope that helps.

alzan

 

[JustaGeek]

Run the Seatools or other utility software for your brand of Hard Drive.

If the HD is OK, try Repair Install of Windows - something got severly corrupted, and Repair Install will replace all the System Files.

All the Applications/Drivers will remain untouched - you will just have to update Windows.

Otherwise - you'll need a new HD.

Good luck!

 

[montag451]

Also, another cable might be worth a try.

 

[PenguinGirl]

Thanks for the suggestions everyone.

About to run SeaTools now..I'll report back.

 

[redbeard1]

If you have your XP cd, there is another way to run chkdsk. Boot from the XP cd and choose the recovery console by pressing r option. A prompt will eventually come up, and normally you would choose the number 1 install. If you have a password on the administrator acount, you will be prompted for it. Once in you can run chkdsk /r. This will force it to check for bad spots. If it finds something to fix, which it will not tell you what it did fix, you should run it again until it does not fix anything. Chkdsk can take a while, especially on large drives.

If Seatools for DOS finds something wrong, it can occasionally "fix" bad sectors. This fix actually just pulls the bad sectors out of use.

 

[PenguinGirl]

Sorry it's taken so long for a response.

I attempted to run SeaTools, but I was unable to for some unknown reason. I was unable to accept the EULA...keyboard wouldn't work. I tried both the USB and an old PS/2 I had laying around.

So I just did a repair installation of Windows, and got even weirder errors than before. Just decided to cut my losses and reinstall. Have since done so.

Have not gotten the previous errors any more, but...

After reinstalling everything, I attempted to install something that required the installation of .Net Framework 2.0. After the installation of that, the previous setup began acting weird, instead of continuing, it opened up an IE window with code in it. (Looked like XML, but I digress...)

So, anyway, I decided to reboot. At this point, I also decided to just go ahead and turn off the computer and finally reconnect my other HD. Upon rebooting, received a window that said that Windows had recovered from a serious error and wanted to send an error report. It sent the minidump and something else and when it was done it sent me to a MS page that said it was a problem with my anti-virus software.

Highlights from the page:

"Problem caused by antivirus software

Although we have not determined the specific cause of this problem, we know the problem was caused by antivirus software."

Then just goes on to give some troubleshooting ideas, how to make sure that I'm only running one AV program, etc. And if all that fails, to contact the manufacturer.

I do not have 2 anti-virus software programs running, only one. Kaspersky, version 6. It's signatures were updated tonight at 11:15 pm, but I honestly don't know when/if the program itself updates.

Error from Event Viewer (the only one in there, btw):

Source: System Error; Category: (102); Event ID: 1003).
Error code 1000008e, parameter1 c0000005, parameter2 89b94150, parameter3 b0ee8a98, parameter4 00000000.


I do have the minidump still...is there anyone that could take a look at it for me? I haven't gotten any BSoDs or anything (**knock on wood**), but I would like to know if there's any way to check in the minidump to see if the cause can be found in there.

Thanks for any help, again. It was much appreciated last time.

 

[RadiclDreamer]

It really appears that you have a dying drive. Do you have a spare lying around that you could use for testing purposes?