Scizophrenic Hard drive.

[Brian Damage]

Here's the lowdown:

I have 2 HDDs in a removeable carriage system that allows one to be in my computer at any particular time...

My games disk (Win 98) has gone round the bend. It happened when I was using Add/Remove Programs to uninstall Jedi Knight II.

First I got about five little popups saying something along the lines of "Error at adress 12c4f53dX85", or something like that.

Then, once those had disappeared and the Add/Remove gui had shut down of its own accord, I got an error popup which said something along the lines of "Cannot find Rundll.exe", or something like that.

So I reset my computer. It starts up, telling me that I should run Scanreg and also that it cannot find a VXD file. So I run Scanreg, and it claims to have fixed the problem with the registry.

Windows attempts to start up, and Lo-and-Behold, NOW I HAVE AN ERROR WHEN IT TRIES TO RUN EXPLORER! So, naturally, Windows freezes and I reset the computer. Basically, it goes through all the previous palarver again, tells me the registry has been fixed, and then tries to run Windows.

Windows now runs, but Internet Explorer seems to be missing certain sections of it's functionality. I can no longer open a link in a new window, the little check boxes in the advanced options section are missing, and it won't open the pictures posted on this site.

Should I reinstall windows, or should I just replace the Explorer files on my games disk with the ones on my Work disk?

Also, my games disk has not been de-fragged in recent memory. I've heard that excessive fragmentation can cause disk errors. Is this true, and could it be the cause?

HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLP!

 

[Gorgon]

Try to install IE first then if nothing changed try reinstall a clean version of windows.

I always reinstall my windows if a big problems like the above one occures, but after backup my important data.

 

[Brian Damage]

I'll try it, then.

 

[Washuu]

reformat that disk!, just my 2cents

 

[Faravid]

Originally posted by Washuu
reformat that disk!, just my 2cents

Scandisk (with hdd surface check), defrag, spybot, another virus scanner, startup programs check (run folder in registry), autoexec.bat and system.sys (or whatever, I don't use that crap anymore so can't remember the files) check, windows update, reinstall IE...

Anyways your windows partiotion has become corrupted probably due to hardware problem in HDD (lockup perhaps) or by some weird Wins***98 problem, so I'd really suggest the scandisk with surface check and defrag.

Also FAT32 (file system in win98) can get screwed VERY easily, partitions should be defragged atleast once in a month and scandisked once in a week.

I'd suggest switching to Win2000...

Myself I'm against everything that has to do with a format or windows reinstall.

EDIT: IE is part of explorer, so when explorer goes nuts, so does IE, btw you can replace explorer with some other more stable program if you want to.

 

[Brian Damage]

Okay, Faravid. What do you think about System Mechanic? I've heard that that's good at keeping your computer running...

 

[Echelon]

could also be a hard ware problem. a "pre" head crash , corrputed sectors. fat32 ain't capable of repairing them, while ntfs at least doesn't use em anymore.

 

[Brian Damage]

I had a couple of corrupted sectors a while ago. Scandisk said it had marked them as "unusable" to prevent further read/write errors.

 

[Faravid]

Originally posted by Brian Damage
Okay, Faravid. What do you think about System Mechanic? I've heard that that's good at keeping your computer running...

When I can't fix a computer problem without "magic tools" then it's broken beyond software side repairs.

 

[Faravid]

Originally posted by Brian Damage
I had a couple of corrupted sectors a while ago. Scandisk said it had marked them as "unusable" to prevent further read/write errors.

Yeah FAT32 can mark them corrupted when scandisk is run, NTFS can do that in the fly.

 

[Brian Damage]

Originally posted by Faravid
When I can't fix a computer problem without "magic tools" then it's broken beyond software side repairs.

Oh, well...

SM stabilised my mum's HDD, that's all I know.:E