You Never Want to See This
by Steven NoonanI don’t know whether to blame the hard drive, Windows 2000, or NTFS-3G. But never in my life do I want to see chkdsk show this again:
It kept scrolling that text for about 10 minutes before finally hitting this BSOD:
So we booted a Windows Vista DVD and ran chkdsk with that to finish the job it couldn’t:
Long story short, we were trying to reformat an external hard drive and ended up putting temporary copies of the data onto the local disk. Unfortunately, the local disk went haywire at that moment, and to make a long story short, most of the files were nicely toasted. The machine needed to be reformatted as well.
Stumble it!
July 1st, 2009 at 8:58 pm
Seems like I was luckier than you. My TB EHD only ‘lost’ a few files. Unthinking, when I first time ever saw this same issue as yours, I’m not sure, but I might not have un-hide things before assuming the files were actually lost per say. By that, I mean the directory was still there, but for the most, the folder’s files I think were all there, just most all the files were missing. Anyway, I used PC Inspector File Recovery (freeware) to locate the bulk of the missing files, painstakingly copied them to another EHD. It was only after I was done with that, and just before I was going to format the seemingly (most likely) troublesome ‘EHD’, I decided it maybe wise to un-hide things and take a look. There I noticed a folder named Dir0000 and inside it, more folders with one I recognized seeing when finding the ‘lost’ files using PC Inspector. That folder was Dir0001.sys and oddly inside it were (I believe) ‘all’ the files I’d ‘lost’, especially quite a few that PC Inspector had listed as 0 bytes, but these files included ‘all’ the files that PC Inspector failed to list (some 10%) as well as ‘all’ the ‘complete-in tact’ files that PCI’ hadn’t allowed me to copy-paste. Somehow I’m leaning toward Vista’s ‘bug’ that for some oddball reason failed to properly detect the EHD when I connected it to the OS (and instead prompted me to do a disk check, big mistake as I allowed it and then saw about the same thing you experienced, less the BSOD I think). Again I’m leaning towards Vista’s software as eing the issue (ie; ‘my’ Microsoft® Windows Vista™ Home Premium version 6.0.6001 SP1 Bld 6001 *SP1 integrated into orig release ver of Windows Server 2008) especially any of my TB EHDs (until this one time recently). What points me to Vista as culprit is that for a few weeks now, the same prompt to do a disk check has been regularly popping up when I inserted a memory stick (512Mb Sony memory stick pro) into the HP dv4-1030ee Vista’s digital media slot. That prompt for the stick’s disk check, never resulted in any error being found, let alone the issue you experienced. So, odds are this’s a Windows bug with the PlugnPlay or harware detection software. All I can say, being the experienced newbie I am, is that I hope my convoluted story is of the least bit of help to you *although I suspect probably not as you’re obviously way beyond what I could ever hope to be (techie-wise). So unless you glean anything from my details that might be of help tracing this matter down, I guess all I can do is never again use disk check when it is prompted as assumedly needed *because for the stck, for a long time, since I dis-trust anything Windows ever wants to automatically do or suggest, I’d grown tired of it and as I had the 512 Mbs already backed up, I let it do the disk check a few times all and each time it reported-indicated no issues with the stick and as the disk check prompts soon thereafter stopped, once I’d allowed it a couple of times, that made me drop my guard whe it prompted such for my TB EHD). Unless you have any tips there for me, all I can do is NEVER again fall for the ‘Windows’ bug in detecting external devices. Lastly, I saved screenshots of all 4 or five pages as a precaution when that happened and would being willing to let you look at them if ver you wanted.