D
Daniel Murphy
i fallow the thread however i don't see the resolved question, could you please explain the solution here? i would truly appreciate it.
if this is too much work, would you better define where i may see the solved problem?
Cha wrote:
Re: System Freezes During Hard Drive Error Checking
29-Sep-08
Problem resolved. See this thread:
http://www.microsoft.com/communitie...eral&mid=222c8b9c-2701-4cda-b2fc-82e8eda2cc42
The short answer is that CHKDSK completed when I ran it from a recovery CD
instead of from the hard drive.
Where to get a recovery CD if it didn't come with your computer (Lenovo
doesn't supply them)?
See the following:
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/0...ion-cd-you-can-still-download-a-vista-recover
http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/windows-vista-recovery-disc-download/
http://www.istartedsomething.com/20070929/vista-sp1-recovery-disc/
Chad
Previous Posts In This Thread:
On Tuesday, September 02, 2008 5:56 AM
Fran wrote:
System Freezes During Hard Drive Error Checking
Hello, I have tried to run "Error Checking" on my Windows Vista Laptop (used
to be called "Scan Disk" in the older Windows versions). For whatever reason,
the system freezes up on Stage 5 of 5 when the checking is 71% complete. I
tried doing this several times and it always stops at the 71% point. I have
to manually turn off the computer. Can anyone suggest what might be wrong
here and how I go about fixing it? Thanks in advnace.
On Tuesday, September 02, 2008 6:45 AM
Rick Rogers wrote:
Hi Frank,Why were you running it?Did disk activity actually stop?
Hi Frank,
Why were you running it?
Did disk activity actually stop?
Sometimes it appears to hang at a certain percentage but it's actually still
working. Keep in mind tha the percent figure is just an estimate of
progress, not a hard and fast figure.
--
Best of Luck,
Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/
Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com
"Frank" wrote in message
news:9E1A5932-CB50-46AE-827C-A89D11BCDBF6@microsoft.com...
On Tuesday, September 02, 2008 11:54 AM
Fran wrote:
Hello Rick - to answer some of your questions..
Hello Rick - to answer some of your questions..
(1) I run disk error checks all the time on my computers because I thought
this was part of the standard maintenance steps that users should perform. I
try to keep my computers running error free.
(2) It appeared to me that disk activity actually stopped at 71% on Stage 5
of 5. The reason I say that is that to the right of the percentage you can
actially see the number of files being checked and it was not moving. I let
the system sit idle like that for almost 2 hours and still nothing moved, so
I manually shut it down.
So where do I go from here? Do you think something is wrong because it did
not complete Stge 5. The laptop is only 4 weeks old!
"Rick Rogers" wrote:
On Tuesday, September 02, 2008 9:20 PM
Rick Rogers wrote:
Hi,I wouldn't run error checking as part of normal maintenance, but there's no
Hi,
I wouldn't run error checking as part of normal maintenance, but there's no
saying you can't. I suspect it's hanging on a file, but as to whether or not
there is actual damage you should run a drive diagnostic tool. These are
commonly available for free from the system or drive manufacturer and run
from bootable media.
--
Best of Luck,
Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/
Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com
"Frank" wrote in message
news:20D1273D-9C95-43A9-8E1C-8B26DC9BCB51@microsoft.com...
On Saturday, September 27, 2008 11:33 AM
Cha wrote:
I am having a very similar issue to Frank's.
I am having a very similar issue to Frank's. I've used PCs forever and
consider myself good at this stuff, but I'm stumped.
After using a new T61 laptop with no issues for a couple of weeks, I started
getting intermittent lock-ups. Wondering if it was related to the disk, I ran
the complete disk check (with surface scan). It always freezes about 80% of
the way through the free space scan. It's always on a slightly different
cluster number, but very close. Like Frank, I leave it for hours to verify
that progress really has stopped. At that point it only responds to turning
off the power.
Other things I've done:
- Run all the PC Doctor tests (a bunch of hardware tests that came
preinstalled) - passed both when running from boot and running under Vista
- Run a memory tester from Microsoft all night long - no lock up
- Installed utilities to monitor CPU and other temperaturs - no heat problems
- Run a drive fitness testing utility from the drive's manufacturer
(Hitachi) - no errors
I'm just about out of ideas. It will freeze at 80% of the way through that
disk check every time, and I'm wondering if that is related to the lock-ups
I've been getting.
I can't afford freezes up in the middle taking notes in a lecture (the
machine's main use), but it did happen at least once a day for several days
last week.
On Saturday, September 27, 2008 12:30 PM
Ringmaster wrote:
Re: System Freezes During Hard Drive Error Checking
On Sat, 27 Sep 2008 08:33:20 -0700, Chad
wrote:
Well, if you consider yourself "good" at this stuff, stop being in
denial. If you run a full surface scan repeatedly and it freezes
around the same spot over and over that should be telling you several
clusters are messed up or at least the File System thinks they are.
Did you run with automatically fix errors turned on?
Surprise, Windows under NTFS is actually pretty good at repairing
common file system errors, but you do need to tell it to fix them
during the scan, otherwise it just reports it found errors. If it can
it uses the brute force method and just marks "bad" sectors and
doesn't use them after moving what it can out of them. You'll see a
summary at the end of any scan disk operation. You should always run
with auto fix turned on.
If you truly have "bad" sectors, ie, something physically wrong with
the disk platters themselves, not just the file system it should again
mark them then skip over them.
One way to know a hard drive is "dying" is it gets an increasing
number of hard errors. This may or may not be accompanied by your
drive starting to make sounds it didn't before. Could be a radical
change or something very subtle like a change in pitch or how loud
your drive is. You can try to "fix" a hard drive or confirm it is
going bad by using a utility from your particular drive maker, like
Seagate. Aside from that things like Spinrite may fix it, but you're
probably better off just recovering what you can from the drive and
replacing it. All hard drives fail sooner or later, often with
absolutely no warning at all which is why backup is so important.
A truly "dead" drive is one that no longer spins up or lost the
ability to accurately control the read/write heads. There's really
nothing practical you can do if something on the circuit board gave up
the ghost or one of the mechanical parts like the motor gave out. More
often the read/write heads drift out of alignment with the main
symptom the drive talking longer and longer to access files or not
being able to at all. That's where something like Spinrite might help.
If your laptop is new, take advantage of your warranty.
On Saturday, September 27, 2008 12:48 PM
Cha wrote:
Thanks for your thoughts.
Thanks for your thoughts.
Yes, I'm running it with automatically fix errors turned on.
I fully expect chkdsk to identify bad sectors and mark them as unusable,
then move on. What's got me stumped it that it's NOT doing that. The system
just freezes at about the same point during the free space part of the scan
(step 5 of 5). That really doesn't tell me what's going on.
If that tells me, as you say, that "several clusters are messed up or at
least the File System thinks they are," how would I fix that? Chkdsk won't
more beyond that point!
As for taking advantage of the warranty, (a) I like to have some idea what
the problem is before I compain, and, related, (b) I can't really afford to
be without the machine for a long time, so if I can prove that is it the
drive (as opposed to the controller on the motherboard overheating or
something like that), then maybe I can convince a repair place to just swap
the drive instead of leaving or sending the whole machine someone for days or
weeks.
So, can you or anyone else out there elaborate on what the system looking up
during stage 5 might mean?
Since this is the free space scan part of the check, what has the file
system got to do with anything?
On, one more question: Does dskchk attempt to write to every sector, or just
read from each one? I'm trying to figure out why it passed the surface scan
in the BIOS, the surface scan in PC Doctor, and the surface scan in the
Hitachi drive diagnostic utility, but it dies during the Dskchk? Does this
point to a file system thing then? And if so, how to fix it?
On Saturday, September 27, 2008 2:49 PM
Cha wrote:
Re: System Freezes During Hard Drive Error Checking
Huh?
Invalid parameter - /p
"the wharf rat" wrote:
On Saturday, September 27, 2008 3:42 PM
Ringmaster wrote:
Re: System Freezes During Hard Drive Error Checking
On Sat, 27 Sep 2008 11:49:00 -0700, Chad
wrote:
The P switch is not needed. All you need is the R switch. Regardless
it assumes you're running from the command prompt, which isn't
necessary.
You haven't said WHY you're doing a surface scan. In 99 out of 100
times it isn't necessary and just slows things way down.
Have you just run with auto repair set to see if it gets through?
That's all I ever do and it works the vast majority of the times. It
never takes more than a few minutes and often will find and repair
file system errors.
If you're running Vista, and you're doing the C drive and Vista is
installed on this drive, it will be locked and you can't do it. Vista
will tell you that, ask if you want to schedule it. Are you doing it
this way? If not, do it this way. It is what Microsoft's software
engineers designed into the system. It is one of the few things in
Windows that DOES work the majority of times.
On Saturday, September 27, 2008 4:02 PM
Cha wrote:
Re: System Freezes During Hard Drive Error Checking
Q1: Why am I doing a surface scan -- As mentioned in my first post above,
because I was trying to track down possible reasons for my system locking up,
and just trying every diagnostic test I could think of. Now that I see it
won't complete that scan, I am concerned.
Q2: Have I run it with only the auto repair option and not the surface scan,
and does that succeed? -- Yes, and yes. But that's not satisfying my concern
re. why the system locks up during the surface scan.
Q3: Am I running it from the Vista GUI, on the system drive, and scheduling
it to take place upon reboot? -- Yes.
So, no, it doesn't seem to work for me. And I'm apparently not the only one
with this problem, based on the first post in this thread, and also on this
thread:
http://www.microsoft.com/communitie...eral&mid=a612cb91-9074-4d78-9142-6cdd5011be24
Any other thoughts on this? Why would the hardware tests from the drive
manufacturer and others pass, but the computer freeze during the Windows disk
check?
Thanks in advance for any additional insight,
Chad
"Ringmaster" wrote:
On Saturday, September 27, 2008 11:19 PM
wra wrote:
Re: System Freezes During Hard Drive Error Checking
chkdsk /r /p
On Saturday, September 27, 2008 11:19 PM
wra wrote:
Re: System Freezes During Hard Drive Error Checking
Yeah, I know
I always err on the side of completeness
Discs do occasionaly develop bad blocks...
On Monday, September 29, 2008 8:51 AM
Cha wrote:
Re: System Freezes During Hard Drive Error Checking
Problem resolved. See this thread:
http://www.microsoft.com/communitie...eral&mid=222c8b9c-2701-4cda-b2fc-82e8eda2cc42
The short answer is that CHKDSK completed when I ran it from a recovery CD
instead of from the hard drive.
Where to get a recovery CD if it didn't come with your computer (Lenovo
doesn't supply them)?
See the following:
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/0...ion-cd-you-can-still-download-a-vista-recover
http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/windows-vista-recovery-disc-download/
http://www.istartedsomething.com/20070929/vista-sp1-recovery-disc/
Chad
Submitted via EggHeadCafe - Software Developer Portal of Choice
BizTalk: Parallel Processing with Correlation
http://www.eggheadcafe.com/tutorial...alk-parallel-processing-with-correlation.aspx
if this is too much work, would you better define where i may see the solved problem?
Cha wrote:
Re: System Freezes During Hard Drive Error Checking
29-Sep-08
Problem resolved. See this thread:
http://www.microsoft.com/communitie...eral&mid=222c8b9c-2701-4cda-b2fc-82e8eda2cc42
The short answer is that CHKDSK completed when I ran it from a recovery CD
instead of from the hard drive.
Where to get a recovery CD if it didn't come with your computer (Lenovo
doesn't supply them)?
See the following:
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/0...ion-cd-you-can-still-download-a-vista-recover
http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/windows-vista-recovery-disc-download/
http://www.istartedsomething.com/20070929/vista-sp1-recovery-disc/
Chad
Previous Posts In This Thread:
On Tuesday, September 02, 2008 5:56 AM
Fran wrote:
System Freezes During Hard Drive Error Checking
Hello, I have tried to run "Error Checking" on my Windows Vista Laptop (used
to be called "Scan Disk" in the older Windows versions). For whatever reason,
the system freezes up on Stage 5 of 5 when the checking is 71% complete. I
tried doing this several times and it always stops at the 71% point. I have
to manually turn off the computer. Can anyone suggest what might be wrong
here and how I go about fixing it? Thanks in advnace.
On Tuesday, September 02, 2008 6:45 AM
Rick Rogers wrote:
Hi Frank,Why were you running it?Did disk activity actually stop?
Hi Frank,
Why were you running it?
Did disk activity actually stop?
Sometimes it appears to hang at a certain percentage but it's actually still
working. Keep in mind tha the percent figure is just an estimate of
progress, not a hard and fast figure.
--
Best of Luck,
Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/
Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com
"Frank" wrote in message
news:9E1A5932-CB50-46AE-827C-A89D11BCDBF6@microsoft.com...
On Tuesday, September 02, 2008 11:54 AM
Fran wrote:
Hello Rick - to answer some of your questions..
Hello Rick - to answer some of your questions..
(1) I run disk error checks all the time on my computers because I thought
this was part of the standard maintenance steps that users should perform. I
try to keep my computers running error free.
(2) It appeared to me that disk activity actually stopped at 71% on Stage 5
of 5. The reason I say that is that to the right of the percentage you can
actially see the number of files being checked and it was not moving. I let
the system sit idle like that for almost 2 hours and still nothing moved, so
I manually shut it down.
So where do I go from here? Do you think something is wrong because it did
not complete Stge 5. The laptop is only 4 weeks old!
"Rick Rogers" wrote:
On Tuesday, September 02, 2008 9:20 PM
Rick Rogers wrote:
Hi,I wouldn't run error checking as part of normal maintenance, but there's no
Hi,
I wouldn't run error checking as part of normal maintenance, but there's no
saying you can't. I suspect it's hanging on a file, but as to whether or not
there is actual damage you should run a drive diagnostic tool. These are
commonly available for free from the system or drive manufacturer and run
from bootable media.
--
Best of Luck,
Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/
Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com
"Frank" wrote in message
news:20D1273D-9C95-43A9-8E1C-8B26DC9BCB51@microsoft.com...
On Saturday, September 27, 2008 11:33 AM
Cha wrote:
I am having a very similar issue to Frank's.
I am having a very similar issue to Frank's. I've used PCs forever and
consider myself good at this stuff, but I'm stumped.
After using a new T61 laptop with no issues for a couple of weeks, I started
getting intermittent lock-ups. Wondering if it was related to the disk, I ran
the complete disk check (with surface scan). It always freezes about 80% of
the way through the free space scan. It's always on a slightly different
cluster number, but very close. Like Frank, I leave it for hours to verify
that progress really has stopped. At that point it only responds to turning
off the power.
Other things I've done:
- Run all the PC Doctor tests (a bunch of hardware tests that came
preinstalled) - passed both when running from boot and running under Vista
- Run a memory tester from Microsoft all night long - no lock up
- Installed utilities to monitor CPU and other temperaturs - no heat problems
- Run a drive fitness testing utility from the drive's manufacturer
(Hitachi) - no errors
I'm just about out of ideas. It will freeze at 80% of the way through that
disk check every time, and I'm wondering if that is related to the lock-ups
I've been getting.
I can't afford freezes up in the middle taking notes in a lecture (the
machine's main use), but it did happen at least once a day for several days
last week.
On Saturday, September 27, 2008 12:30 PM
Ringmaster wrote:
Re: System Freezes During Hard Drive Error Checking
On Sat, 27 Sep 2008 08:33:20 -0700, Chad
wrote:
Well, if you consider yourself "good" at this stuff, stop being in
denial. If you run a full surface scan repeatedly and it freezes
around the same spot over and over that should be telling you several
clusters are messed up or at least the File System thinks they are.
Did you run with automatically fix errors turned on?
Surprise, Windows under NTFS is actually pretty good at repairing
common file system errors, but you do need to tell it to fix them
during the scan, otherwise it just reports it found errors. If it can
it uses the brute force method and just marks "bad" sectors and
doesn't use them after moving what it can out of them. You'll see a
summary at the end of any scan disk operation. You should always run
with auto fix turned on.
If you truly have "bad" sectors, ie, something physically wrong with
the disk platters themselves, not just the file system it should again
mark them then skip over them.
One way to know a hard drive is "dying" is it gets an increasing
number of hard errors. This may or may not be accompanied by your
drive starting to make sounds it didn't before. Could be a radical
change or something very subtle like a change in pitch or how loud
your drive is. You can try to "fix" a hard drive or confirm it is
going bad by using a utility from your particular drive maker, like
Seagate. Aside from that things like Spinrite may fix it, but you're
probably better off just recovering what you can from the drive and
replacing it. All hard drives fail sooner or later, often with
absolutely no warning at all which is why backup is so important.
A truly "dead" drive is one that no longer spins up or lost the
ability to accurately control the read/write heads. There's really
nothing practical you can do if something on the circuit board gave up
the ghost or one of the mechanical parts like the motor gave out. More
often the read/write heads drift out of alignment with the main
symptom the drive talking longer and longer to access files or not
being able to at all. That's where something like Spinrite might help.
If your laptop is new, take advantage of your warranty.
On Saturday, September 27, 2008 12:48 PM
Cha wrote:
Thanks for your thoughts.
Thanks for your thoughts.
Yes, I'm running it with automatically fix errors turned on.
I fully expect chkdsk to identify bad sectors and mark them as unusable,
then move on. What's got me stumped it that it's NOT doing that. The system
just freezes at about the same point during the free space part of the scan
(step 5 of 5). That really doesn't tell me what's going on.
If that tells me, as you say, that "several clusters are messed up or at
least the File System thinks they are," how would I fix that? Chkdsk won't
more beyond that point!
As for taking advantage of the warranty, (a) I like to have some idea what
the problem is before I compain, and, related, (b) I can't really afford to
be without the machine for a long time, so if I can prove that is it the
drive (as opposed to the controller on the motherboard overheating or
something like that), then maybe I can convince a repair place to just swap
the drive instead of leaving or sending the whole machine someone for days or
weeks.
So, can you or anyone else out there elaborate on what the system looking up
during stage 5 might mean?
Since this is the free space scan part of the check, what has the file
system got to do with anything?
On, one more question: Does dskchk attempt to write to every sector, or just
read from each one? I'm trying to figure out why it passed the surface scan
in the BIOS, the surface scan in PC Doctor, and the surface scan in the
Hitachi drive diagnostic utility, but it dies during the Dskchk? Does this
point to a file system thing then? And if so, how to fix it?
On Saturday, September 27, 2008 2:49 PM
Cha wrote:
Re: System Freezes During Hard Drive Error Checking
Huh?
Invalid parameter - /p
"the wharf rat" wrote:
On Saturday, September 27, 2008 3:42 PM
Ringmaster wrote:
Re: System Freezes During Hard Drive Error Checking
On Sat, 27 Sep 2008 11:49:00 -0700, Chad
wrote:
The P switch is not needed. All you need is the R switch. Regardless
it assumes you're running from the command prompt, which isn't
necessary.
You haven't said WHY you're doing a surface scan. In 99 out of 100
times it isn't necessary and just slows things way down.
Have you just run with auto repair set to see if it gets through?
That's all I ever do and it works the vast majority of the times. It
never takes more than a few minutes and often will find and repair
file system errors.
If you're running Vista, and you're doing the C drive and Vista is
installed on this drive, it will be locked and you can't do it. Vista
will tell you that, ask if you want to schedule it. Are you doing it
this way? If not, do it this way. It is what Microsoft's software
engineers designed into the system. It is one of the few things in
Windows that DOES work the majority of times.
On Saturday, September 27, 2008 4:02 PM
Cha wrote:
Re: System Freezes During Hard Drive Error Checking
Q1: Why am I doing a surface scan -- As mentioned in my first post above,
because I was trying to track down possible reasons for my system locking up,
and just trying every diagnostic test I could think of. Now that I see it
won't complete that scan, I am concerned.
Q2: Have I run it with only the auto repair option and not the surface scan,
and does that succeed? -- Yes, and yes. But that's not satisfying my concern
re. why the system locks up during the surface scan.
Q3: Am I running it from the Vista GUI, on the system drive, and scheduling
it to take place upon reboot? -- Yes.
So, no, it doesn't seem to work for me. And I'm apparently not the only one
with this problem, based on the first post in this thread, and also on this
thread:
http://www.microsoft.com/communitie...eral&mid=a612cb91-9074-4d78-9142-6cdd5011be24
Any other thoughts on this? Why would the hardware tests from the drive
manufacturer and others pass, but the computer freeze during the Windows disk
check?
Thanks in advance for any additional insight,
Chad
"Ringmaster" wrote:
On Saturday, September 27, 2008 11:19 PM
wra wrote:
Re: System Freezes During Hard Drive Error Checking
chkdsk /r /p
On Saturday, September 27, 2008 11:19 PM
wra wrote:
Re: System Freezes During Hard Drive Error Checking
Yeah, I know
I always err on the side of completeness Discs do occasionaly develop bad blocks...
On Monday, September 29, 2008 8:51 AM
Cha wrote:
Re: System Freezes During Hard Drive Error Checking
Problem resolved. See this thread:
http://www.microsoft.com/communitie...eral&mid=222c8b9c-2701-4cda-b2fc-82e8eda2cc42
The short answer is that CHKDSK completed when I ran it from a recovery CD
instead of from the hard drive.
Where to get a recovery CD if it didn't come with your computer (Lenovo
doesn't supply them)?
See the following:
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/0...ion-cd-you-can-still-download-a-vista-recover
http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/windows-vista-recovery-disc-download/
http://www.istartedsomething.com/20070929/vista-sp1-recovery-disc/
Chad
Submitted via EggHeadCafe - Software Developer Portal of Choice
BizTalk: Parallel Processing with Correlation
http://www.eggheadcafe.com/tutorial...alk-parallel-processing-with-correlation.aspx