Bad drive or my fault in fdisk

[Chrissirhc]

Hello, I get problems with scandisk a knowledgable man told me that I could have a faulty drive. These are the facts;

After running the computer for a few days I try to run defrag. Defrag reports errors. I use scandisk in windows and (it used to not work and report no errors but just tried it halfway through this message and it fixed the errors. Usually I go into dos and run scandisk then the errors get fixed. Anyway...
I don't think my hard drive should get corrupt after 3 days.

My ideas:

When I ran fdisk I created a primary partition and an extended one. These added up to ~27Gb and the size of my drive is 30Gb. To be more clear I have a c: partition and a d,e,f, and g. These all add up to 27Gb. So I did not allocate 3GB of the drive anywhere.

XEmacs is somehow messing up my hard drive.

I have latest virus mod so I don't think its a virus (I hope).

Scandisk error log.
It consisted of many errors of the this type


The C:\WINDOWS\APPLIC~1\IDENTI~1\{3C2C2~1\MICROS~1\OUTLOO~1\WINDOWS\APPLIC~1\IDENTI~1\{3C2C2~1
folder could not be opened in MS-DOS mode because its complete short name
was longer than 66 characters.
Resolution: Ignore this error and continue
Results: Error was corrected as specified above.

But this is the one that is worrying me

ScanDisk found 61440 bytes of data in 2 lost file fragment(s).
Resolution: Discard lost file fragment(s)
Results: Error was corrected as specified above.

In DOS I think its described as harddisk is reporting in correct size. I have important data on my computer so if you think this problem can grow and finnally destroy my data please tell me. Maybe I can continue just running scandisk twice a week, but that seems a little scary.

Be very grateful for any help.

Chris

 

[edfair]

You will find discrepancies in hard drive sizing. Some has to do with 1 mb being either 1,000,000 or 1,048,000. Some has to do with the way partitioning works. As long as FDISK shows everything allocated you are ok.
Run the windows version of scandisk. The DOS version doesn't like the long filenames or the long paths.
Evidently you have lost fragments of two files. Don't think that is significant at this point. I would proceed on.

Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[Chrissirhc]

I hope you are right. Its just strange to me that this happens every few days. My old computer didn't have problems with the hard drive for much longer periods.

with Fdisk I just didn't allocate some space at all so I had ~27GB shown when I have a 30GB hard disk. From my memmory I don't think it told me that I had 30GB. Or do you mean that I should run fdisk now and check?

 

[edfair]

Run Fdisk and look at partitions and drives on extended partition. Should show everything used. At least none unused.
Don't worry about missing some drive space.
The defrag normally won't run (or doesn't want to run) when the disk isn't fragged. Scandisk will run anytime you want it. And it may find problems. As long as it isn't marking bad clusters I would assume that the drive is ok. Scandisk is looking for FAT table inconsistencies and will correct what it can.
If scandisk continues to find files bad then you need to look further inot what is getting munged. If it is data then you start to worry. But until then I would just watch.

Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[Chrissirhc]

How about this one I got this morning I just ran scandisk out of curiousity.

The drive contained an error in its FSInfoSector.
Resolution: Repair the error
Results: Error was corrected as specified above.

 

[edfair]

Not familiar with this one. What OS are you running?
What happens when you turn around immediately and run it again after repair?
Anything you have reported so far has to do with logical addressing, not with the media as such. And logical addressing and updating of files is more a function of the OS so long as the physical media is taking the info.

Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[Chrissirhc]

I'm running win 98 SE. The scandisk reported boot sector error so I just clicked repair then looked at the log and this came up. I downloaded the diagnostics hard disk utility from IBM and it reported no errors for the hard drive. I also have errors with filename lengths that always come up as I don't repair them.


Drive System (C contained the following errors:

The C:\WINDOWS\STARTM~1\PROGRAMS\GAMES\3DGAMES\STARTR~1\STARTR~1\ELITEF~1
folder could not be opened in MS-DOS mode because its complete short name
was longer than 66 characters.
Resolution: Ignore this error and continue
Results: Error was corrected as specified above.

The C:\PROGRA~1\CREATIVE\DEMOS\ISLE_O~1\TEXTURES\CHARAC~1\QUAGMIRE\FINAL
folder could not be opened in MS-DOS mode because its complete short name
was longer than 66 characters.
Resolution: Ignore this error and continue
Results: Error was corrected as specified above.

The C:\PROGRA~1\CREATIVE\DEMOS\ISLE_O~1\TEXTURES\CHARAC~1\QUAGMIRE\HIGH_RES
folder could not be opened in MS-DOS mode because its complete short name
was longer than 66 characters.
Resolution: Ignore this error and continue
Results: Error was corrected as specified above.

Thanks Ed
Chris

 

[edfair]

And how are you running scandisk? Error message says DOS mode. I've never run across this message but I haven't been in SE that much. Must assume that there is a DOS limit on the path length. How about a windows version of scandisk. It should be happier with long paths. I'll be out to te closest SE machine Tuesday so I'll look there to see what gives. In the meantime , if nobody else responds, don't worry about the long file name errors.

Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[Chrissirhc]

I think I'm going to network my computer up and copy all the important files from this computer to the other and do a low level format on the hard drive then re-install windows. Scandisk reported bootarea errors on every drive partition before and I'm scared that maybe two months down the line my computer will be faulty and that will really be the wrong time for it go faulty so I should fix it now. Unless someone was able to tell me these errors aren't serious but for windows and dos to tell me every three days that the drives are reporting the incorrect size does not seem good at all and no one in these forums have come across this exact same problem before!#

Cheers for your help.

Chris

 

[edfair]

One small piece of advice: Low level formatting and reinstalling may resolve some of the problems but does not in itself relieve you of the neccessity of developing, testing , and using a viable backup system for protection of your valuable data.
Backup, Backup, Backup.

Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[Chrissirhc]

Didn't bother re-installing and am living with the problem for the momment. I went to the windows site and there is a new update which allows the hard drive to write its cache before shutting down. Apparently this occurs on new computers with new hard drives with caches (mine has 2Mb)and only included as standard on windows ME.

I wonder if this has been my problem the hard drive has not been writting to the hard disk before it shuts down therefore the bootarea reports a smaller of space free then there actually is because it got written to first. My computer if it shutsdown shuts down extremely quickly (immediately), funny thing is it doesn' go straight into scandisk it boots up normally. Maybe scandisk there would find errors, but I don't know how to turn this option on.

Chris

 

[edfair]

Sounds reasonable. Evidently an oversight on the part of either the OS writers or an advance in hardware that wasn't well thought out. Fortunately I dodn't get into this bleeding edge stuff much, I'm more trailing edge.

Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.