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vista write protecting partition

R

random betrayal

Member
I have a strange problem that keeps popping up lately. I usually just put my machine to sleep so I can start up instantly and this works great. But on the occasion that I do reboot when I get into the desktop one of my partitions is write protected and no amount of "messing" with it can release it, including changing ownership and any other measures that I know of.

Strange thing is if I reboot again it is fine. I don't get what is going on. And it is only the one partition every time, the other partition on the same hard drive is fine. I don't know what rebooting twice does to it to make it go away.

It is not a major annoyance but an odd one I thought I would see if anyone has an idea as to what's going on.
 
Ever since upgrading to SP1, I've been running into the same problem myself.

However, in my case, rebooting does not help. If I format the partition the lock is gone (even though it fails after it finishes formatting saying format could not complete.)

I also found out on the web if you just run checkdisc (not a complete check and no autofix) it will go through quickily report no errors and undo the lock. I did that last night and it worked fine.

I've also run into a similar problem with other files. Sometime certain files/directories will get locked in the same manner and I'm not allowed to delete them until I reboot. Its really frustrating highlight a file on your computer, hit delete, and nothing happens what so ever. Right click and "delete" doesn't even exist in the menu.

I'm not sure what is causing the issue, with my problem last night I installed MIcrosoft Develoepr Studio 2005, MSDN Library, and installed SP1 on the MSDS, and when I went to run the Vista patch, the patch process go about half way through then quit complaining about write protect. As far as I can tell its spontanious and will even pop up half way through installs.
 
I've done more research and paid more attention to this issue, and I think I have it nailed.

Every time I BSOD, it seems a partition ends up in a locked state. When running scan disk, it sometimes remove the lock, but othertimes you just have to reboot, or do a combo of those.

I have a Gigabyte MB (965 I believe), but its known according to google to crash frequently on boot with a BSOD with 4 gigs of RAM. This is a BIOS error, not a windows problem. It usually gives me the "REGISTRY_ERROR", or "REGISTRY HIVE ERROR" or something with the registry. The next time I boot, it comes up with the windows start menu asking to boot in safe mode, etc. If I start windows normally, I get the locked partition somewhere on my system. (Seems to be the D drive where my games are these days, before it was on E/F but I use those infrequently so it could be happening there but im not noticing it)

But if I just click "restart computer" after doing a scandisk, the problem always goes away. I never have the issue when my computer boots regularly.

With the Gigabyte BIOS bug, I crash atleast 20% of the time I cold boot the computer, and I have the problem every single time with error, and never get write protected problem when it succeeds.

There might be something Microsoft can do about it. Maybe BSOD hits some code which puts a lock on the HD, that doesn't get cleared when the start menu pops up and you start "windows normally" but I'm not sure.
 
Wow 20% of the time seems really high. I have not had a BSOD since the original post so I have not had anymore issues with this. I have not heard of the bug with the gigabyte boards, is it only on the 965 series?
 
My motherboard is the Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 (rev. 3.3), and it appears other people with Gigabytes are having similar problems.

Here is the thread that I read:

http://forums.techarena.in/showthread.php?t=677924

That thread indicate its a combo with Gigabyte boards with 4 gigs RAM + Raid drive enabled (maybe a few other MB's so maybe its a chipset issue?) But whatever the case, I fit into the criteria. I have 4 gigs and RAID. Looks like I will have to reinstall and remove RAID drives.
 
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