9 Legend

 • 

87.5K Posts

October 13th, 2006 14:00

Sounds like there is a good chance your hard drive is failing. Power on, F12, Dell diagnostics, extended test, hard drive.

October 13th, 2006 17:00

Thanks. Learned a lot from that experience.

I did as you said - pwr on, f12, diagnostics, extended test. It took over an hour to complete and it tested everything on the machine, not just the hard drive. Because you had said to esp. check the hard drive I then clicked on the customized test function and started to run another test of the hard drive. But I had literally just watched it run the same test as part of the extended test, so I aborted it.

Everything passed the diagnostic tests. This mystery is getting deeper.
Just tried to run Diskeeper, but had the same error message show up about CHKDSK.

It would be a bummer if my hard drive is failing. This computer is not 1/2 a year old yet.
Any other suggestions?

2 Intern

 • 

4.4K Posts

October 14th, 2006 19:00

I have not come across those messages before, and you give no details of your PC or OS. Assuming that you have Windows XP, you could try the following:
 
click start, run, type sfc /scannow click OK [note space betwen c and /]. It may ask for your XP CD.
 
Then in My computer or Windows Explorer, right click on your C;\ drive, click properties, tools tab, click check now, check the first box (or both if you want to check for bad sectors as well, that can take a long time), click start, you should get a message that chkdsk will run on restart. Restart, maybe with that set chkdsk will run.
 
PS One more thing possibly worth trying: in msconfig, boot.ini tab, click check all boot paths. (to open msconfig click start, run type msconfig click OK)

Message Edited by JRosenfeld on 10-14-2006 10:01 PM

October 15th, 2006 11:00

Thanks for the suggestions.

Yesterday I contacted Dell Support directly using their chat funciton. They were great. One of their techn guys remotely took over my computer and made several modifications. But alas, the CHKDSK problem persisted even after that. By email they told me to reboot in safe mode and run the error check on the hard drive. Even that was unable to run because it could not access some files it needed to see/control. So I wrote them again and asked them what to do. I got a surprising yet encouraging response - they said that based on the stuff they and I had attempted they were now convinced that indeed my hard drive is in the process of failing and is not salvageable. So they are sending me a new one. Not the news I wanted, but I will say this - as long as I buy PC's I'll be sticking with Dell - their service has been unbelievable good.

So I guess the leason learned is - you can't stop a CHKDSK. Here is to hoping none of you who read this ever have the same problem

Cheers,
No Events found!

Top