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When I booted my computer today it took forever. I waited and waited lookiing at the hourglass timer and eventually said "enough is enough' and hit control alt delete. it brought up a box showing 1 system application not responding. I said to quit that one, and then the boot resumed but later gave me a message saying that it was having trouble accessing the registry.The system never finished it's boot.
When I rebooted, scandisk runs and (after sitting there a long time) now I get an error that says "scandisk encountered a problem accessing the FAT. scandisk cannot fix this problem" and then quits.
GULP.
I noticed someone here had a similar problem in December and someone sent them norton disk doctor. Is that what I should be running? I don't have it :-( Also my backup PC doesn't have a floppy disk drive. Can it be made to run from a CD ?
sportybry@yahoo.com
- Brian
Try to perform a registry restore. Reboot and hit F8 while booting. Select command prompt. Type command\scanreg/restore and hit enter. Highlight a date that is prior to installing that program. Hit enter and you should be in business. This may or may not solve your problem, but shouldn't make things any worse.
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First off, thanks for the feedback and help :-)
UPDATE:
ok- the system fixed itself PARTIALLY today. I guess every time it rebooted it fixed a little something. Eventually it would reboot entirely, and my programs all appear to run. EXCEPT when I run scandisk. It says partitions d, e, and f are all fine but when I go to scan "c" it hangs right after it says it's checking the file allocation table.
If I then reboot, windows runs it's DOS scandisk and that still gives me the 'unable to open FAT' error. Obviously I still have some fixing to do.
I unzipped and copied norton disk doctor to the e: drive. rebotted from win 98se install disk, and ran program. I selected 'analyze system' and it asks me if there are partitions I can't access. I say "no" because I can access everything. it then says it can't read the settings on HD partition 2. so I hit a key to continue...and it says it can't read HD partition 3...and on and on it goes...partition 20, partition 40...
Hmmm.
Is this running into to some kind of problem because of my Adaptec AAT1200A raid controller card? (I run a dual disk mirror array).
What other disk utilities should I run to help fix this?Any and all halp is much appreciated.
- Brian
sportybry@yahoo.com
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UPDATE 2:
I ran Windows scandisk again, with the 'automatically fix errors' setting OFF. It looked like it had crashed again but I just left it run. When I went back 1 hour later it was displaying the message (not word for word but this is close) "this disk has serious errors in the system area. if you continue to use it, your programs may stop working and you may use data. perform a thorough surface scan now...."
um....ok.....so does that mean one of the hard drives in my raid array has died? or is it possible this is just a corrupt FAT or corrupt registry?
- Brian
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Didn't you think using a RAID array was relevent? I would guess that one drive is either dead or corrupt.
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ummm....I kinda forgot about that when posting the original.
Maybe I should pull a drive tomorrow to "break" the array then run scandisk on each one separately and see if one tests ok and the other bad?
- SB
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Hi DAVEINCAPS,
Can you send me one? My latest is Norton 6 which I woulsn't trust on a 40G FAT32.
TIA
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If at first you don't succeed, you're about average.M2
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That version is probably not going to know what to do with RAID drives. It should work OK with drives with regular fat32 partitions but the most I've done with it is to verify it sees a 6 gig partition OK.
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ok - so what should I do, then, with a RAID array? Is there another software package I should use?
I have been sick the last week so I haven't been around to use my computer.....or even the internet on this one :-o
- Brian
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I haven't done anything with RAID drives but I'd guess there's some RAID diagnostic software that could help. Otherwise a newer version of Norton Utilities might help. I think Norton comes with a bootable rescue disk. You'd need to verify it works with RAID drives before you buy anything.
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Hi, Just a thought. Two Fats are kept by the system. Fat problems are fixed by copying the good Fat to the bad Fat. If both Fats are bad you get the message you are getting. Hard Drive failure in the system area is indicated. Try FDisk and Format /s. You may get the drive back if it's not caused by a hard failure, All your files will be lost. If you can read them, save your stuff first.
Good Luck, Jim
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