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| | | Senior Forum Advisor
 
Group: Senior Advisor
Last Login: 12/1/2007 4:53 AM
Posts: 200, Visits: 117 |
| This is just an interesting occurance, i needed to document somewhere, mostly because the "solutions" provided go about the thing the wrong way. i found 60 "solutions" on the web, and they basically had no solution, because the problem was both too simple and yet to complex.
ONLY 1 of the 60 "helps" provided even came close to addressing the actual issue at hand.
so lets start with what a person sees as the error (or more importanatlly what i saw)
a stop error, that says NTFS.sys in it, and a bunch of useless numbers :-)
OR
the computer just goes into constant reboot. and the user knows NOTHING.
OR
an eronious error about the kernal itself missing
one of the NTFS partitions has a minor issue, and the disk is not set as "dirty" so no checkdisking is done, as soon as the NTFS.sys driver tries to access the MINOR corruption, it fails miserably.
this leads to the users computer going into constant reboot (EVEN if autoreboot is off) or tosses up a NTSF.sys stop error.
it can also toss the notorious KERNAL error NTKERNL whatever is corrupted.
of the 60 solutions, they could be things like (what might seem obvious)
NTFS.sys is corrupt, it was not.
the hard drive is bad , it was not.
the operating system installed has some software , like anti-virus, defraggin, or something installed, that is not working right, it did not.
some software aspect of the operating system is incorrect, it was not
what it was is a very minor corruption of a NTFS partiton, and that is all. yup 3 possible different errors, 59 useless non solutions, and more than 120 things you can do that will accomplish NOTHING, if not make it far worse.
the only REAL solution was to CHKDSK the drive, which presented a total KETCH22 (for me at least) how do you chkdsk a drive that the stupid system cant see, use or crashes miserably with?
other Real solutions that worked for people:
Play with it in partition magic
mess with it in linux
change it on a MAC
Yes, all 3 completly different operating systems that would address a NTFS disk with different methodologies.
ok , so WHY is this important?
well for one 59 of 60 solutions were wrong
this can still occur in Vista.
Why does it cause people to replace perfectally operational hard drives and format data, when ALL the data is 99.99% intact. because there is no magic way to fix this issue still?
remove the faulty NTFS partition from the system, and everything functions normally, put it back again, and everything goes to heck, you cant even format it easily (within the system), so the immediate assumption becomes the disk itself is failing, and you toss out a perfectally good disk. only because everytime you put that disk into play it wreaks havoc, not because the disk itself is bad.
i saw all the programs on something like a HIREN recovery disk, and yet i didnt see any program that would do a fix for this exact problem.
a few thing might have worked, like format the disk (quick not destructive), then unformat or recover it, change the file system with partition magic, or alter the partition enough to cause a re-check of the data.
if the disk had the dirty bit set , which is another Ketch22, the system might not have failed? i donno.
anyways its a crasy minor problem that can turn a perfectally functional XP or Vista system into a nightmare, and the problem is very simple, microsoft barfs on itself, and cant go past the minor situation. and like other minor problems, everything you try becomes a brick wall you bash against, because the actual problem is not addressed.
there are supposed to be some hotfixes for it in vista, but aparentally they dont work. i have no idea how anyone would Intall them :-) when the system is inoperational.
It happens out of the blue, nothing changed, nothing failed, just a minor crash or reboot during writing of data or something. it was illogical for me to assume that something had changed when nothing had changed, it was illogical to assume that the hard drive had failed , when the hard drive was working (as seen by the raid controller)
one little bug up its butt, and the whole system becomes a Ketch22 of repair.
every item that tried to access it failed, partion magic hangs, ghost fails, recovery console or Xp install cant see the disk, most restoration software wants to see something there First to restore from.
When i removed the disk from the system (unplugged) the system returned to normal, because the system has 2 "boot" drives (one on each raid set) i was able to revert to a clean operational boot system, but as long as the NTFS partiton with the minor error was in the system, some error or another would show up.
and like All microsoft errors they were most meaningless and detached from the reality of the problem.
and of course every software would show another completly erronious error.
When i removed JUST the partition itself, not the disk (lowest common denominator) by hacking the partition table and lying to the system, again the system works as if nothing was ever wrong. i had the system believe it was a Fat32, which inerted that partition, making it basically inaccessable till formated. all data is still intact, yet the system does not see the error
I had discovered through the process of elimination WHAT was causing everything to fail, the only thing left was finding a way to stop the cause.
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This Poster knows NOTHING about VISTA , if your issue was VISTA related , then it don't apply. |
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Forum Administrator
Group: Administrators
Last Login: 8/9/2008 6:13 AM
Posts: 8,231, Visits: 16,485 |
| Hey Vid - GREAT to see you!!!! Hope all is well and Happy Holidays  - I've missed your eloquent prose!Just curious - were you not able to boot to the recovery console to run chkdsk?
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| | | Senior Forum Advisor
Group: Senior Advisor
Last Login: 12/1/2007 4:53 AM
Posts: 200, Visits: 117 |
| Hi Allan
elegent prose huh :-) everyone else calls it mispelled glop 
because its on a Raid device unrecognised by a winders install cd, it must have drivers, even though the same raid is accessable via both dos and win98, and about every other utility out there, without a driver (full hardware raid).
because the floppy is dead there is little access with a xp install disk.
Xp wants a "floppy" to install "SCSI" drivers so a usb stick has to act a lot like a floppy to use it.
my new computer doesnt even Have a floppy. i suppose a "slipstream" would fix that.
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This Poster knows NOTHING about VISTA , if your issue was VISTA related , then it don't apply. |
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Forum Administrator
Group: Administrators
Last Login: 8/9/2008 6:13 AM
Posts: 8,231, Visits: 16,485 |
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