SOLVED!

[mitchafi]

In my ultimate noviceness, I didn't even think to try to run chkdsk in safe mode. Of course, as soon as I did, it ran flawlessly and cleaned up the drive just fine, no more wacky errors when defragging. Sorry for bugging you all, sometimes computers drive me nuts. At least I learned something new that may help me down the road.

Cheers 🙂

 

[mitchafi]

Anyone, please, I'm really going crazy here. Out of the blue this happens and I can't defrag my C: drive anymore. I have other partitions on the drive that are fine. In Diskeeper I can't even analyze the C drive without getting that error (ScanNtfs: Scan Aborted - Fatal Error - File: \\?\C:\$Extend). Everything seems to be working fine though, except that I can't install UT2K4. Is my HD dieing? It's brand new.

 

[sharkeeper]

From the command prompt, try chkdsk c: /f /r.

Reboot the system to complete the process.

Cheers!

 

[mitchafi]

Ran it and rebooted. Seems just like the feature you can access by right clicking the drive letter and using the error-checking tool. When I reboot it flashes something very quickly along the lines of "could not read file system" and then goes into windows, leaving the problem unsolved.

 

[sharkeeper]

Go here and download lifeguard tools and run this application. Have a floppy handy. 🙂

There may be something wrong with your drive.

Cheers!

 

[mitchafi]

dangit don't have a floppy in this pc...will have to go grab it back out of the other one.

 

[mitchafi]

No errors, data lifeguard tells me that the drive is perfectly normal. Everytime I boot windows dskchk tries to access the volume directly but says it failed and continues to boot into windows...

 

[mitchafi]

help! edit: please, I'm very distraught. Everytime everything is working fine for a while something all of the sudden gets out of whack. It's an ongoing cycle and it drives me crazy. I thought my first build went pretty smooth, but now I am beginning to have my doubts. Hell, I wish something would just break already so I could RMA it and then I would know for sure what the problem was.