Many issues on hard drive with XP

I have two hard drives on my computer, both with XP installed, just in case I need a back up when one crashes. Most of my files are duplicated on both drives. Last week, my 40GB drive began to be very slow to load on startup. After a few days of this, I couldn't open this drive due to boot failure. I ran scandisk and was told that there were 274 bad clusters that were fixed. I ran the XP repair and got the drive up and running, but I can no longer access the Internet from that drive. Everytime I try, I get the message "Please install a modem." I have no problem getting online with the other HD on the same computer, and in going into control panel, I'm told that the modem is functional with no problems. When I defragged the drive, I was told that 20 fragments (1.5GB) from \pagefile.sys could not be defragged and there is a lot of red on my operating system partition for that drive. I contacted Western Digital, and they suggested that I download Data Lifeguard Diagnostics from their site, as the HD could be good and this could be a problem with WinXP. I did so and ran the tests. Those tests said that there is nothing wrong with the hard drive. Do I have any other options other than to reformat the drive and do a clean reinstall of WinXP?

 

On the problem computer, open device manager, right click on your modem and select unistall. Reboot the computer and allow it to reinstall it.

I take it you are on a dialup connection?

 

Zander,
Thanks for the suggestion, but nothing changed. Even if I can get the modem to work on that drive, is it a good idea to have 1.5GB of fragmented files on the drive, along with the fact that 274 clusters have been isolated by Windows as unusable when there is no problem with the drive?

 

Hi Barry. Seen this problem for the first time - HDD utility says its ok but WinXP says it not.

Its normal to have 1.5 GB of fragmented files - if your hdd is 80 GB, its about 2% of the space - hardly anything to loose sleep. Anyway, WinXP defragger would not touch pagefile.sys, it just works around it.

Suggest that you backup, reformat & reinstall. Something fishy seems to be going on and a direct action seems to be most appropriate.

 

note that while XP 'fixed' problems it found, it may have been too late ... wipe the system and reinstall clean and i'd bet u'd be fine. my $ is on the fact that the drive IS fine, the OS ain't

 

Can I reinstall Windows XP without reformatting, so that I don't have to make sure that all files have been transferred to the other disk, or should I just start from scratch?

 

me? i'd opt clean. i always do tho

u CAN repair install tho.

 

Repair install may not help here. Reformat (full) & reinstall.

 

I had already run the repair install. It got me up and running, but left me in my present situation. Thanks, everyone, for your input. When I get around to making sure that all my files have been transferred, I will reformat and do a clean install. Does anyone have a solution for adding an additional 8 hours to each day?