SP4 & Corrupted files on an external drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter Bob Haley
  • Start date Start date
B

Bob Haley

I Have a Maxtor 200 GB external drive, since I upgraded to
SP4 on W2K Pro, files have been getting corrupted only on
the external drive. Chkdsk will not fix or permanantly
delete the bad segments.

Maxtor is of no help, they just say back it up and
reformat, but this does not address the root cause. Before
I go that extreme has anybody seen this. I am trying to
determine if it is hardware or software.
 
Bob,

It's probably software.

And though this may sound biased coming from an MS employee, it's probably
not Microsoft software. The NTFS filesystem and disk drivers are exercised
daily in millions of machines worldwide. While it's possible you've
uncovered a new bug in Microsoft code, it's just not very likely.

What's more likely is that some driver is writing data to blocks of memory
that it's not supposed to, or otherwise misbehaving.

Trying to find the source of corruption can be an extremely frustrating
experience. I would suggest that you start by enabling driver verifier on
your machine. Go to start, run, and type "Verifier.exe". Go to the Settings
tab, click on Preferred Settings, Apply, Exit, and reboot your computer.

This causes the operating system to perform additional checks when drivers
perform certain functions. It will slow down your machine a bit but should
catch most common driver bugs. If your machine bluescreens (verifier will
bluescreen the machine when it finds a driver misbehaving), note the driver
name that verifier points out. That's your suspect.

If you can't boot with verifier on, you can boot to safe mode and run
verifier.exe again to disable verification.

-Matt
 
I bought a Maxtor 40G hard drive and installed W2K on it
for an older PC. I have been getting oddball errors
showing in the event log, stop error (boot sector
related), bad sector errors and finally a disk crash. I
ran a low level format as Maxtor recommended and
reinstalled the OS. I rebooted several time and got no
errors until I got the download for SP4. Then the second
or third time I booted I got the bad sector error again.
Ran chkdsk /r /f and got no errors. Have worked with
Maxtor and ther utility and it keeps telling me that
either the disk has error that it has fixed or that it has
no errors. Maxtor has been on little help. This sucks.
 
similar problem, Maxtor 120GB and a 12GB drive, reporting
errors when chkdsk reports everything ok....staying away
from sp4 for now..
 
Back
Top