drive property pages unavailable

[woggie]

Greetings -

This is weird. I recently had to replace WindowsME with Win2k. I subsequently had an install of Office 2000 hang but, after having killed the install routine in Task Manager, it appeared to have installed anyway. Afterward, however, the property sheets for the drives in My Computer are not available. Right-click, pRoperties and, with the drive selected, Filemenu, pRoperties - neither gets any response. As a matter of fact, none of the hot-keys on those menus are underlined.

I think that the Office 2000 install was still incompletely registered or something. I subsequently tried to install another Win2000 resource kit app which claimed that there was an unfinished install and offered to reverse it. I clicked Yes and it started showing a reversed progress bar (<-- (filled to empty) instead of --> (empty to filled)) and when it got down to zero, it popped a form saying a file that it needed access to had not been accessible. Then it started to do the same thing again. This happened several times before I figured it must be looping and had to kill it through the Task Manager. When I rebooted, the Office applications that had been (apparently) successfully installed were gone. I guess that the Office uninstall was what was being done by the &quot;reversal.&quot;

Whatever. Anyway, now I can't run an error-check on the disks because I can't access the property pages for the drives. Unless someone can tell me what the executable is for whatever replaced scandisk.exe in Windows 2000, and where I can find it.

Any ideas?

Cheers, PaulW

 

[TestNode]

Hmm, not on W2k at the moment, but you could search for disk and return all the results. Don't think that W2k has 'scandisk' though. It does have chkdsk.exe, which does not replicate scandisk functionality per se.

I have noticed that recent MS apps do not behave well with that progress bar. They do not follow the tradition of the bar representing an entire process, but rather individual processes. Unfortunately this is causing you pain.

Suggest that you cut to the chase and perform a repair install of your OS. For assistance on this, search for repair in the help files.

Tao is the mobius. The ribbon of heaven and earth, you cannot lose your way.

 

[butchrecon]

Can you right click on MY COMPUTER and go to MANAGE? Does anything come up? If so go to DISK MANAGEMENT. Once that has opened clcik on the drive in question on the right side. Go up at to and go to ACTION then ALL TASKS. From there go to PROPERTIES. Can you get to it then? For a command line version you can go to START>RUN then type CMD
Once the prompt is up type chkdsk then enter. This will run the command line version of check disk. Once that is finished. At the prompt type: sfc /scanonce
Hit enter then reboot. When the system begins to come back up this command will scan the system files for errors. Let us know how it goes. James Collins
Systems Support Engineer
A+, MCP

email: butchrecon@skyenet.net

Please let us (Tek-tips members) know if the solutions we provide are helpful to you. Not only do they help you but they may help others.

 

[woggie]

Thanx for your response, TestNode - I only mentioned the progress bar thing as an observation of the process that went on. In itself, it's not a problem to me. The problem I have is twofold.

1. The Office install is hung and appears to be interfering with the normal operations of the OS, as evidenced so far by ...

2. &quot;My Computer&quot; offers property pages for drives, one tab of which is &quot;Tools&quot;, which contains a button for drive &quot;error-checking&quot;. I think that button was available in Windows 98 and ME as well. In those OSes, that button ran scandisk.exe (I think).

So, basically:

1. The robust(!) Win2k is sluggish and quirky in this installation, and
2. I can't check the disks for errors.

Searching out &quot;disk&quot; in the Win2k help system for relevant articles reveals only the error-checking button on the property page. I will check out the OS repair install process right now and will get back to this thread on my results.

Cheers, PaulW

 

[woggie]

Thanx for your response butchrecon (James) - (You must spend your entire life on this board. I see your activity in every thread in every forum that I've gone into!)

To answer your questions:

Can you right click on MY COMPUTER and go to MANAGE? Does anything come up?
Yes.
If so go to DISK MANAGEMENT. Once that has opened clcik on the drive in question on the right side. Go up at to and go to ACTION then ALL TASKS. From there go to PROPERTIES. Can you get to it then?
No. Same non-result. Again, there are no underscored hot-keys evident in any menus. (BTW, I had tried that, but neglected to mention it.)

BTW, another symptom of this mess is that the PC hangs on shutdown. I have to power it down (there's no reset button - <damn HP Pavilions!>) and then power it back up, at which time it does it's self-check of the drives, running chkdsk.

My understanding of chkdsk is that it was a holdover from MS-DOS and had been augmented with, and then replaced by the superior scandisk in succeeding versions of Windows. The chkdsk that runs on reboot here looks very much like the old DOS one - very quick - and doesn't appear to do a surface scan. That's why I'm looking for a Win2k scandisk equivalent.

But I'm not really sure now that this problem is disk-based. Now I'm thinking that there is an OS install problem. I'm about to try the repair. I'll let y'all know how it goes.

Cheers, PaulW

 

[woggie]

Well, guys'n'gals - the repair improved the performance noticeably, but there are still no property pages coming up for drives, nor hot-keys underscored in the menus for them. Context Menu items for other purposes work just fine.

If no one has any other suggestions, I think I'll just have to re-install the OS altogether.

Cheers, woggie

 

[butchrecon]

Did you try SFC? I dont spend ALL my life here. Just most of it. LOL
I use this forum to learn and become a better technician. I hve learned ALOT since joining. My employers are impressed with what I have accomplished here. So much so that my performance here was one of the factors of me getting a latteral promotion. So I owe tek-tips a lot. PLUS the techs here are great. James Collins
Systems Support Engineer
A+, MCP

email: butchrecon@skyenet.net

Please let us (Tek-tips members) know if the solutions we provide are helpful to you. Not only do they help you but they may help others.

 

[woggie]

Thanx, James - I'm getting a lot out of Tek-tips as well. And once in a while it's nice to be able to help someone out.

However, none of us know everything, and you've found yet another hole in my knowledge! What is SFC and how does one try it? I tried typing it in in Start/Run and it flashed a command window and I have no idea if it did anything or not.

Cheers, woggie

 

[rhyno2k]

Woggie,

My guess is you're using ZoneAlarm, correct? I had this same problem a few months ago, and couldn't figure out for the LIFE of me what I had done to my system! After much searching, one gentleman on a Usenet newsgroup posted a little-known article about Zone Alarm's &quot;TrueVector&quot; service, which interferes displaying property pages in Win2K.

Zone Labs hasn't admitted to it yet, I don't think (I could be wrong, haven't checked their site in a while). But as soon as I disabled TrueVector, bam. My folder & file property pages were back in action!

I believe you have to disable the checkbox in ZA - &quot;Load ZA at startup&quot;. I unchecked this and inserted the link to ZA in my Startup Folder. This gives you a chance to cancel TrueVector before it loads.

Of course, if you're not running ZoneAlarm, this doesn't help you much, but a few people I know have, and were as perplexed as I!


Good luck,
--RHYNO

 

[butchrecon]

Sorry. SFC is System File Checker. It checks system files for corruptnes and replaces it with the origianl from the CD (Which you need handy).
To use SCF go to START>RUN and type sfc /scanonce
Hit enter then reboot. It will come up automatically when you reboot and check the files. Sorry for the confusion on it. And you are correct. We cannot know everything. It is just IMPOSSIBLE! James Collins
Systems Support Engineer
A+, MCP

email: butchrecon@skyenet.net

Please let us (Tek-tips members) know if the solutions we provide are helpful to you. Not only do they help you but they may help others.