Another glorious evening of attempting to not have to re-install windo$e

[Rastalovich]

Ok, a friend of mine - who happens to be 1000s of miles away so I can`t just pop-over - decided to defrag her harddrive. (nothing against Frag)

It just so happens that almost an hour into the process it was still showing an almost full white pictoral with 1 red line. - she restarted it - and yes it`s effed.

U reboot and it gets to just after the Windo$e XP loading screen with the scrolly, sorry shudders, blue squares thereafter it blue screens with white text at a quick flash and restarts - and the cycle continues.

I`ve talked her through taking the drive out and plugging it in as slave to the Dell she has to look at the details of the drive. Under management it shows it as an 80g drive, however under properties it`s 0bytes with 0bytes available and is 100% full. Hence the dumba$$ error checking thing thinks "ooo a 0byte drive and just closes quickly" - no "do u want scandisk to run on restart?".

Running chkdsk comes up 50million errors and I`m sure /f will do something that it thinks is helpfull but probably isnt.

Any thoughts on an interupted defrag other than re-installsville-usa ?

 

[FragTek]

Sounds like the smartest thing to do at this point is to completely zero the hard drive, it takes quite a bit of time but it is the most sure fire way to wipe out any disk errors and make sure they dont come back unless the drive itself is faulty.

And why-o-why would you want to de-me?

 

[Toxcity]

She has plugged it in as a slave on a differnet mechine, if so:

She has to take ownership of the drive before it shows her its secure info.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308421

That fixes the ownership problem.

If the drive still says 0kb then there really is a problem!

 

[Rastalovich]

Nah it`s nothing security wize that is the problem, it`s the sector/tracks that are all over the shop atm >.<

 

[nathan]

low level format and reinstall windows. sounds like there's alot of corruption going on.

 

[equk]

That's mental

All I'd do is remove all partitions, reboot and then start again, partitioning it etc just to see what happens. In theory it should be ok as the Partition tables and File Allocation Tables will be reset.

Any problems after that and I guess just do a low-level format.

Were there any problems before she started defrag?

 

[Rastalovich]

No problems whatsoever. Not even anything minor - coz believe me I`d get a call.

It`s been decided now that a new drive is going to be bought to replace this one, so as this one can be put to 1 side so I can use some tools on it and extract whatever precious files I can. ??

Can`t w8 to get back to Tx tbh

 

[JN]

I'd go the chkdsk /f route tbh. When i had a Raid0 array fall apart on me, i did chkdsk on one of the drives and actually managed to get a few bits and bobs back.

Its deffo worth a go before formatting etc.

 

[Rastalovich]

Ya tried the /f after and it looked like it was doing stuff.

Ran the chkdsk again and it gave the same result.

I`ll see what some fbi-esq tools can do to it when I can get my grubby mits on it.

 

[Sticky Mick]

You tried accessing it through a Linux Live CD.

Rescued a few bits of data off various drives that way.