On Sun, 1 Jul 2007 10:32:02 -0700, Burr
My computer ran out of battery and shut down. When I re-started it, it
required a disk check on the C: drive for consistency, it said "Checking file
system on C:The type of the file system is NTFS" It starts to check the
files, but gets to 7 percent complete and pauses every time. There is no way
to cancel the check and no matter how long I leave it there it will never get
past 7 percent.
That's AutoChk / ChkDsk for you... the user control dates from before
MS-DOS 6, even if what they (try to) has been completely revamped.
There are two ways, the "easy" and the "safe"...
The "easy" way is to ignore the possibility that the reason why ChkDsk
(or rather, AutoChk) "stops" like this is because the HD is physically
damaged, or the file system is significantly deranged to the point
that "fixing" it may irreversibly trash data, bootability, or both.
Because these "fixers" are too brain-dead to provide an "escape", you
have to bad-exit via reset or power off when they get "stuck". Hullo,
more file system damage.
Then on next boot, press Esc during the tiny sliver of seconds you
have before AutoChk blunders into action. That gets you into Windows,
which involves all sorts of writes to your at-risk HD and file system.
From there, I'd suggest you backup your data, or what's left of it.
The "safe" way is to make sure the HD is physically OK before rtesting
the file system, and make sure the file system is logically OK before
attempting to boot Windows again.
That means testing the physical HD first, without booting Windows. To
do that, you'd need stuff that you probably didn't get with the PC and
that don't come with Windows, such as the free HD Tune utility from
www.hdtune.com running from a Bart PE boot CDR.
If you have a Vista OS DVD, you can boot that, choose Repair, and find
your way to "Command Prompt". You will have read the at-risk HD's
installation to get this far, and hopefully that won't have bogged
down in file system insanity or bad sector retries.
Now you have successfully booted an off-HD maintenance OS; something
that wasn't possible with XP, if you were a "normal user" and limited
yourself to what MS provides. But you may find that even though you
have HD Tune on a USB stick or CDR, and you can "see" these from the
Vista DVD boot command prompt, they won't run.
There may be other ways to test the physical HD without booting Vista
off it, such as diagnostics from HD vendors, etc. Do what you can, if
there is anything you can find that works.
Else, you'd be forced to take risks, such as trying a ChkDsk /R that
will first "fix" file system errors automatically (no prompting for
permission, no undoability, high risk of data loss) and only then go
on to check the HD surface for errors. This is not much better than
what AutoChk is already failing to do, but at least you have less
Windows writes to the at-risk HD and file system as you go.
I would definitely evacuate that HD before doing anything else, unless
you can test it safely first (e.g. HD Tune off a Bart CDR boot). Even
if testing it first, I'd abandon testing as soon as I saw "just one"
bad cluster, and backup my data, preferably without booting Windows
off the now-known-to-be-failing HD.
When I try to system restore it says that there is an error
with the C: drive and offers to check the drive at re-start, but then I run
into the same pausing problem.Does anyone know of any solutions to this
problem? I'd really appreciate it!
Do you get the impression that MS hasn't really thought out this
scenario? I sure do...
The more you write to the disk, the more likely you will lose data and
perhaps bootability, and the less likely you will recover your data.
So System Restore, in these circumstances, is a Bad Idea.
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