Hard Drives locked by application or operating system

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Guest

This is a cry in the dark as I have run out of ideas.

Has anyone encountered the following (there are
innumerable symptoms):

The system is a micron millenia 733 running Windows XP
Home. 512mb ram. Operating system on drive D (it was an
upgrade installation from Windows 98 about a year ago)

It was running fine. Now it gradually bogs down and has
to be rebooted. Outllok will not download email or export
information. IT will not allow Word 2000 to save to disk.
When I try to repair Office 2000 is has an internal
error. When I try to reinstall Office there is a Windows
installer error. I cannot do a Norton virus scan or
liveupdate. If I try to run disk doctor or any of the
drive repair utilities - I get the message that the
drives are locked by another process or the operating
system.

I have scanned the drives on this machine over my network
and it found the Trojan.download which I removed. I have
reinstalled XP. I have tried running in Safe mode,
removing all of the startup programs etc. No JOy.

The system hardware appears to be running fine.

At this point I am looking at doing a low level foramt
and start from scratch.

Any other suggestions or clues would be great!

Thanks,
Rich

..
 
This is a cry in the dark as I have run out of ideas.

Has anyone encountered the following (there are
innumerable symptoms):

The system is a micron millenia 733 running Windows XP
Home. 512mb ram. Operating system on drive D (it was an
upgrade installation from Windows 98 about a year ago)

It was running fine. Now it gradually bogs down and has
to be rebooted. Outllok will not download email or export
information. IT will not allow Word 2000 to save to disk.
When I try to repair Office 2000 is has an internal
error. When I try to reinstall Office there is a Windows
installer error. I cannot do a Norton virus scan or
liveupdate. If I try to run disk doctor or any of the
drive repair utilities - I get the message that the
drives are locked by another process or the operating
system.

I have scanned the drives on this machine over my network
and it found the Trojan.download which I removed. I have
reinstalled XP. I have tried running in Safe mode,
removing all of the startup programs etc. No JOy.

The system hardware appears to be running fine.

At this point I am looking at doing a low level foramt
and start from scratch.

Any other suggestions or clues would be great!

Thanks,
Rich
Click to expand...

Rich,

How full is the hard drive? Could it be full, and fragmented? If
it's full enough, you might see any of these symptoms.

A format and reinstall might be the best solution here - but check for
malware first. Spybot S&D and HijackThis might find something of
interest - NAV / Symantec isn't the best tool here. Get advice from
SWI Forums. Start here:
http://forums.spywareinfo.com/index.php?showtopic=5187

Cheers,


Chuck
I hate spam - PLEASE get rid of the spam before emailing me!
Paranoia comes from experience - and is not necessarily a bad thing.
 
Chuck,

Thanks for the response. I'll check out that link. My
drives are both only about 20% full. I did run spybot
succesfully and found nothing. All very odd. I am
thinking that a low level reformat may be in order.

If I find an explanation - I'll pass it on.

Cheers,
Rich
 
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