I was running defrag on one of my hard drives, when the system suddenly rebooted, very unexpectedly. It just -- zip -- clicked off and rebooted. Don't know why. But my question is whether that does damage to my file system? I mean, it's moving files all over the place, and in the middle of a job, clip, it reboots. Does that mean I now have lost clusters or file fragments or files that have been damaged? If so, can I recover them? Thanks in advance, TB

Boot to your install cd. Choose "R" to get to the recovery console. Type chkdsk /r . Cheers.

Yes it is very likely that it will cause file loss. It happened to me one time and I wasn't even able to boot in to Windows. If your pc is still bootable click start>run and paste sfc /scannow into the run box. If you can't boot type sfc /scannow while in safe mode with command prompt. That should replace any damaged or missing Windows files. If it were me I would back up your files and do a clean install of Xp. Little problems are likely to creep up due to lossing power during a defrag. You might be lucky though. Sandman

On the other hand, I've had a reboot happen in the middle of defrag several times and never had any ill effects... I'd suggest the Macker2 route before going to the more major step of reinstalling XP if you don't see anything that seems wrong. (If a file did get fouled up, depending how much you have on your HD other than Windows the odds could well be that it was something other than a Windows file that was being moved at the momemt of reboot.)

I got bad news to tell you. Even if Windows boots OK if and when after the defragmentation process crashes, the file system is corrupted, thus even when things appear to be OK, within weeks files will start to get corrupted, more corrupted and even more corrupted and eventually, you will be unable to boot Windows. Likely, all files will start being misplaced and become inaccessible. You will get file errors. Thus, you *must* *repartition*, *reformat* and *reinstall* Windows. *Before* repartitioning, refomatting and reinstalling Windows, you *must* *erase the drive with zeroes*. You can do this with disk data wiping utility, BCWipe from: http://www.jetico.com After running the BCWipe installer, copy BCWIPEPD.EXE, the BCWipe DOS utility from: C:\Program Files\Jetico\BCWipe\Bcwipepd to the boot floppy disk.

Ouch. You are not a harbinger of good news at all. I have followed all steps to restore my system (thanks, everyone). In many ways it "seems" stable, but I did get another crash last night when installing a program. I will check out BCWIPED. Can you explain why I'd need to rewrite with zeros even if I repartitioned? I thought repartitioning removed everything from the drive? Especially with the reformat? Thanks, Tegan

You don't need to do a zero fill on the drive. Just pop in the Xp cd, reboot and let Windows reinstall itself. Make sure to do a clean install and not an install over top of the old one. If you do it correctly Xp will give you the option to reformat the drive for you. Sandman