Check for Consistency......

All of a sudden, upon boot-up, my P4 with XP is showing "Checking file system on C: The type of the file system is Fat 32. One of your disks needs to be checked for consistency....etc...

I let it run, it gets up to 7% completed, then shuts down and does the same thing, up to 7% - blank screen, starts all over again with the above message.

I know I can by-pass that by clicking any key within 10 secs, but that's not the point. I'd like to correct the situation. I have tried System Restore for 3 previous dates and when it boots up, each time it says "Cannot be Restored to (...date..) System Checkpoint.... to choose another retore point... restart System Restore.... then it goes to the above scan and message.

Anyone any ideas that may help me here ???? (have tried Ad-Aware & Spybot)

 

Personally I feel you should use NTFS instead of FAT32. Much more stable.
I have never seen NTFS check disks like that.

 

A matter of opinion. Both systems are equally good IMO and I prefer fat32 because I don't need windows to access it.

reknaw,

Go ahead and bypass it if you can and run the scan and defrag in XP.

 

By-passing is no problem, but unable to find the XP Scan....any idea where that would be ??? I've tried Run "msscan" etc but no such applications

 

Boot from your XP CD to the Recovery Console. Once there (command line prompt) do chkdsk x: /r (where X is any drive/partition and you should do them all).

With the system running from the CD you can get a chkdsk to run to a good completion unless the drive is seriously messed up and about to fail. Maybe even then. Chkdsk /r will do the most complete exam you can get with XP.

 

When you're done, look in your event logs and see what error triggered the chkdsk, and what it needed to fix.

Johanna

 

possible concern that chkdsk is throwing an exception. very curious to hear results of newts' suggestion.

 

Newt,
Is that better than right-click disk in explorer, go to properties, tools, click check disk for errors?

 

Sparrow - for a normal chkdsk, either way is fine but if someone opens a cmd window and does chkdsk /f or chkdsk /r, I know exactly what they will be running. I did recommend selecting it from the normal GUI until a couple of folks got confused and then I just started telling them to run it from a cmd prompt. I'm sorta old school and a command line fan so that is the way I run it myself even if I've gone to the GUI for a drive cleanup where I'm just a tab away from the option.

But with the problems this poster spoke of, I'd like to get him totally off the hard drives in question to run the scans. Similar to doing a scandisk in 9X while booted from a floppy. The utility can just function better when running from a source away from the drive it is scanning.

 

This is my 4th attempt to reply - twice from my problem pc and twice from my laptop.... hopefully this will work as I want to bring you guys up to date.

I did try Newt's suggestion and used the XP CD and the chkdsk c:/ r command.... three times to went blank at 3% completed......

At that stage I took it to my favourite pc repairman, who seems to think it may well be the harddrive. It's a holiday here in Canada today so I'll probably know more tomorrow (Friday) and will let you know the results.

Not often that you guys have been unable to "fix" my problems. I really appreciate all your responses - that's what's so great about this site.

Thanks again guys.

 

Agreed. Thanks.

 

Based on this result, I completely agree with your repair guy. I think the drive is well on it's way to being useful as a paperweight.