AbeL Posted March 24, 2003 Share Posted March 24, 2003 I'm running XP Pro on a PIII 450 MHz system. I have two hard drives; C: is 40 GB and is about half full; D: is 20GB and has about 3GB free. I've had no problems with either drive until this weekend. Now whenever I try to make any changes to D: it looks like the change was accomplished, but after I re-boot the changes are gone. By "changes" I mean create a new dir (or sub-dir), write a file, or delete a file or dir. It doesn't matter if I log in as admin or limited user, I even tried booting the system into DOS with a Win 98 recovery diskette. I've run virus scan, and scandisk; no problems found. The C: drive responds normally.I was thinking about re-formatting D: but I hope there is something less drastic I'm overlooking - any ideas?One other piece of info - I tried to backup important data that's on D:, but burns to CD failed. However, if I copied the files to C: and then burned THAT worked ok.Thanks for any help, Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest LilBambi Posted March 24, 2003 Share Posted March 24, 2003 Are the partitions on both drives NTFS?From the way you were talking, it sounded like you have in the past been able to make directories and place files on the D: drive, but now these changes do not hold, is this correct? Or is this a paritition that holds a manufacturer's system restore 'disk'? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stryder Posted March 24, 2003 Share Posted March 24, 2003 I'm running XP Pro on a PIII 450 MHz system. I have two hard drives; C: is 40 GB and is about half full; D: is 20GB and has about 3GB free. I've had no problems with either drive until this weekend. Now whenever I try to make any changes to D: it looks like the change was accomplished, but after I re-boot the changes are gone. By "changes" I mean create a new dir (or sub-dir), write a file, or delete a file or dir. It doesn't matter if I log in as admin or limited user, I even tried booting the system into DOS with a Win 98 recovery diskette. I've run virus scan, and scandisk; no problems found. The C: drive responds normally.I was thinking about re-formatting D: but I hope there is something less drastic I'm overlooking - any ideas?One other piece of info - I tried to backup important data that's on D:, but burns to CD failed. However, if I copied the files to C: and then burned THAT worked ok.Thanks for any help,Do you have multiple users/accounts on your machine? Someone may have set permissions or made that drive "private" or taken "ownership" of that drive, which depending on the settings they used when taking ownership or setting up permissions, could prevent deleting and creating. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest LilBambi Posted March 24, 2003 Share Posted March 24, 2003 That's the type of problem that it is kinda emulating to some extent...a good point Stryder.But I believe he said that he had tried the changes with both the Administrator User and the Limited Use Users. Plus I thought he said he could see the changes before he rebooted, but not after??And as far as I know and have seen, Administrator is like the root user in Linux to a large extent. Which would generally mean Administrator has full rights to make system-wide changes on the system right down to drives, directories, files, settings, users rights, etc.If it is that, could someone have created another Administrator account, and removed some of the rights of the original Administrator account? Can that even happen in WinXP?If what Stryder is suggesting did happen, maybe it is time to review all the users in the system and see what rights each actually has??On another note: Wonder if the partition has some bad spots that have not been mapped out on it during partitioning/format?? I am still wondering if both drives are NTFS or if this drive was Fat32 and brought forward from a previous OS installation on the computer?? How old is this drive? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Big Jeff Posted March 24, 2003 Share Posted March 24, 2003 Is there a chance that the space is being reserved for system use? Specifically, Defrag, System Restore, Virtual memory? I know defrag needs 15% of the drive free in order to work. The other two are set manually. Just a couple ideas to toss around for the real experts. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest ThunderRiver Posted March 24, 2003 Share Posted March 24, 2003 My fear is that NTFS has been corrupted!Use the following commandchkntfs d:If it is clean, hardware may be the culprit. Howver, if shows "dirty" it means you should copy files immediately before too late. Reformat after retrieveing all the files out. Check with EventViewer and see if you find any error or warning messages as well. Hope that helps! Good luck!I had similar problem when I was upgrading from Windows 2000 to Xp, but if that's the case, follow my previous intructions still. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AbeL Posted March 24, 2003 Author Share Posted March 24, 2003 Hi: Thanks for the responses so far. To answers some of the q's you've raised:I am the only user of the system, and I maintain two accounts; a limited user acct which I use for day-to-day activity, and an Admin. account for those times when XP says I need more privs.Each drive is a single partition, FAT32. There are no hidden partitions of any kind. I bought the system 3 years ago to my specs from a Mom & Pop store. Both disks were added after I outgrew the original 10GB drive, and both of these drives have been in the system for well over a year.Prior to this weekend I was able to read and write to either drive from either account and those disk changes would "stick" until I decided to make a change. Now, D: drive only will not preserve changes through a re-boot regardless of which account was used in making the change; C: drive still operates as before.Just to add a little more to this tale, I rebooted to DOS using a Win98 Emergency disk. In this environment, either I was prevented from making deletes to D: with an error msg "Write error reading from specified drive"; or, sometimes the delete would seem to proceed, doing a dir would confirm the files were gone, BUT, after a reboot they were back. Is there such a thing as a haunted PC ? It acts as though D: is write protected, except I don't get any such msg when attempting to write, and the disk properties of both drives are set the same.I ran a different virus checker this afternoon and it reported a clean system.Thanks for any other ideas. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest ThunderRiver Posted March 25, 2003 Share Posted March 25, 2003 Abel, wow, that's the weirdest thing I ever heard, but I do feel that if you have a spare drive, replace D with the spare one and see if the problem still persist. My best guess is that the hard drive is malfunctioning or overheating possibly, which causes some erroneous result? I wish I could help you out more, but none of my machines are having FAT32 at this moment, and even way back to the time with Windows 98, I never had such problem with FAT32.Anyone has any more solutions to Abel's computer problem? Thanks!Thunder Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AbeL Posted March 26, 2003 Author Share Posted March 26, 2003 Hi:I want to thank everyone who tok the tim to read and respond to my tale of woe. In particular, Thunderriver, your idea to substitute another disk for the 20GB D: started a chain of events which took me all day. I have an old 500MB drive (remember when we thought 0.5GB was ALL the storage we'd ever need?) that I knew was still functional when I took it out of service. Sub'ing that for D: I found that it worked as expected. Putting the 20GB back showed that plugging and unplugging didn't "fix" anything. At that point I was pretty sure I had a bad drive, but still wanted to try reformatting. So I started the lengthy process of copying all important files off the drive.With the files protected I formatted within XP. XP reported "format complete", and WindowsExplorer showed that the file structure was UNCHANGED. One more try, this time from the DOS prompt. DOS produced the following msgs:Format completeUnable to write BOOTFormat terminatedWrite fault error reading drive D:Abort,...So I guess I can conclude that this drive has faulty write circuit(s). Off to visit my friendly retailer tomorrow for a replacement.I can't imagine what the consequences would be if this had been the system drive!This was a new experience for me.Thanks again, Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mike Posted March 26, 2003 Share Posted March 26, 2003 Abel...That certainly is the strangest thing I've ever heard of... I probably would have tried a different drive as well.. I'm glad you figured out the problem(s) and posted back here for us to learn from yuor experiences...Thanks... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest ThunderRiver Posted March 26, 2003 Share Posted March 26, 2003 Hehe.. yeah, I am glad my suggestion helped a bit. By the way, I recently replaced my laptop 40 gig hard drive as well. Over the past few month, I had tons of hard drive controller error, so now I switched from Fujitsu to ToshibaSo far so good, but just like IBM TravelStar, Toshiba has loud hard drive sound.. I kind dislike it hehThunderRiver Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AbeL Posted April 1, 2003 Author Share Posted April 1, 2003 Well its been several days since I installed a new drive; a (very quiet) 60GB 7200rpm WD and everything is back to normal.But the mode of failure continues to puzzle me. What I mean is: the old drive must certainly have had a write circuit problem, maybe a dead write head, so when I thought I was writing data, in fact nothing was being "put on" the platter. So... why/how was I immediately able to see the files using Windows Explorer? Why or how was I able to view the contents of the files?Is it possible that the file structure and their contents were being retained in memory (the system has 384 MB)? I had discounted this as being likely because these writes survived logging out and logging on as a new user. Any speculation?Abe Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
greengeek Posted April 1, 2003 Share Posted April 1, 2003 Did you try the bad drive in another computer?Joy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest ThunderRiver Posted April 1, 2003 Share Posted April 1, 2003 Well its been several days since I installed a new drive; a (very quiet) 60GB 7200rpm WD and everything is back to normal.But the mode of failure continues to puzzle me. What I mean is: the old drive must certainly have had a write circuit problem, maybe a dead write head, so when I thought I was writing data, in fact nothing was being "put on" the platter. So... why/how was I immediately able to see the files using Windows Explorer? Why or how was I able to view the contents of the files?Is it possible that the file structure and their contents were being retained in memory (the system has 384 MB)? I had discounted this as being likely because these writes survived logging out and logging on as a new user. Any speculation?AbeI honestly can't answer that question, especially since your drives are FAT32, not NTFS. If it is NTFS, yeah, the possibility is there, especially with NTFS 3.0 used by Windows 2000.It is also possible that the drive you have has this tendancy to write in the cache first bofore actually writing out the data on the actual hard drive, and when you reboot, it just doesn't get enough time to be written on the disk. Nonethless, your case with FAT32 is plain weirdness. It does make you wonder what's going on though.Thunder Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AbeL Posted April 1, 2003 Author Share Posted April 1, 2003 I guess it'll just have to be blamed on gremlins.Joy: No I didn't try the bad one in another computer, and now its too late - the trashman picked it up today.Well the important thing is that the computer is again fully functional. Thanks again to all who offerred suggestions.Abe Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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