Unable to read security descriptors...

[KLC]

My wife tried to print out a project from Printworks version 22. The computer froze up, there was an hourglass but nothing would work, not even Ctrl-Alt-Del.

After a hard reboot I get the Win XP Pro splash screen and then I get a warning that my hard disk needs checking and XP is going into CHKDSK.

Checkdisk goes through step 1 of 3, Verifying files; it goes through step 2 of 3, Verifying indexes. But at step 3 of 3, Verifying security descriptors, I get the following message:

Unable to read security descriptors data stream

After several minutes of no activity the screen goes black and I get the following message:

A disk read error occurred, press Ctrl-Alt-Del to continue.

When I do that I get the same black screen with the disk read error message. If I hard reboot I go through the complete routine again.

So obviously my hard drive is working in some way since I get the XP splash screen. Has my OS been corrupted or is this a hardware problem? I'm going to repair XP with the installation disk but I thought I'd check here first.

Thanks for any help.

EDIT:

I tried to use Windows recovery console on the installation disk to fix the problem. After choosing the recovery console I got a message saying there was a problem with NTFS.sys, "page fault in non paged area" and then the system shut down.

Any insight?

 

[VirtualLarry]

I'd say your HD is failing, or perhaps turning the computer off corrupted some sectors on the disk, so that they return errors when read. I don't think getting a "disk read error" when doing CHKDSK is normal at all.