The other day I tried to shut down my computer and it gave me many blue screens with errors. It wouldn't shut down so I had to restart. When it restarted I got this message: "While initializing device VKD: Windows protection error." And it told me to restart. I cannot get into Safe Mode even. I can get to the command prompt, and I've tried various things there. I looked on this board for ideas of things to do, and I tried them. First I tried unplugging the keyboard and plugging it back in. That idea didn't work. I then tried Scandisk. Scandisk found an error 22% of the way from being done, but it FROZE!!! I had to reset again. It happened a couple more times. Then, when I did the scan again, it had the sector marked as bad. Now scandisk freezes at that part. I tried another scanning program, spinrite, and it didn't freeze. It did not, however, fix the problem. I'm thinking that scandisk will not fix the problems now because it already thinks it did when it marked the sector as bad. I'm curious as to your thoughts/suggestions on this matter. If it comes down to it, I'll reformat my harddrive, but we're talking about losing over 2-3 gigs in MP3 files and probably around 10 gigs in MPG files. I OBVIOUSLY don't want to lose that since that computer has a 56K modem. Imagine trying to redownload all that stuff. :|

Actually, it was 22% into the scan, not 22% from being done... not that that makes much of a difference.

Hello Shane, As problem occur to be your hard drive with bad sectors I think the best is to re-install first all your computer using the restore kit provided with your computer when bought, unless you wish to waist your time from blue screen to freezing which mean you have a fatal error on your Windows.ini and System.ini files..... you will be upset and exhausted to see your computer always closing.... Better do a clean and good full reinstallation........

Also so you don't loose all of your data, it would be good to get a new HD and install the operating system on the new HD. Then you can take your old HD and put it in any computer as a second HD to see if you can copy the data off your old HD before more sectors go bad.

www.pcmech.pair.com is a good site and forum.my wife's puter had same problem. norton util's did not even help and it is a good program.will lose all data but save hdd.go to hdd manuf. site eg:maxtor,seagate,etc. get the drive util. do a low level format,(write zeros to drive,)partition,format and install os lost data but drive still works good luck

I have the same problem. I made a bootdisk Win98 on another machine. Now I could boot my computer with a DOS prompt and safed some Word files with floppy. On MS support they say its a problem with initializing the keyboard and has nothing to do with your disk. Perhaps you can make a cable connection under DOS?

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;en-us;q263318 Here's what evil corp. (AKA microsoft) has to say about it. I've been working on a guy's comp for a while trying to fix this. Take my advice and don't do any sort of reformat. Best to just try another keyboard. I reformated the thing and re-installed windows and I couldn't even get it to run the first time, just shot back to that error. Try replacing the keyboard and PLEASE tell me/us how it went. But do trust me when I say that a reformat will not garuntee a cure for this issue (so I can't see how any other software manipulation would).