The other day I did routine monthly maintenance on my music PC. (dual core Athlon 2 GB RAM Win XP service pack upped.
I did the disk check that schedules to happen at reboot, but when I started the other one that checks and recovers bad sectors, it started and got to Phase 2, then said CHKDSK cannot continue at this time. And stopped. I don't think this has ever happened before. Rebooted, the boot disk check worked perfectly and found nothing, but this other is worrying.
Does anyone have any ideas why this might have happened?
I haven't tried to run it again, and the computer is working fine.
Could this be a sign the PC is starting to flake?
It's a couple of years old.
Thanks for any help/insight on this.

It could be - all disks fail sooner or later. But you do regularly take full image backups of your disk(s), don't you?

are you on a single disk... started checking from within a running OS? There's checks it won't do from the properties box...so thaat would be normal

Yes and yes. Backed up and on a single disc. No, it's not normal. If you right click your drive there's a tab that says Tools. On that box are two options. It can only do one after a reboot. The other one has worked real time going back to when I can remember.

I had another diskdefrag utility that failed time after time, actually unhandled exception.

Then did chkdsk and it did stop as well, don't remember what it said.

But the c:\tmp folder had changed it's attributes to a file, so when to create temporary files or something it failed.

Some places are used very often and get worn down sooner.

Deleted file and created a new tmp folder and all was set.

Isn't there a logfile to study where it stops?
And delete the file(to recycle bin) manually and try again.

No exception fault. It said simply DiskChk cannot continue and went away. There was an error log and I opened it but couldn't understand it.

It was defrag that made an exception in my case.

Make a command prompt an type

chkdsk /?

to get the options.

/I and /C might make it come all the way through.

/V is good for more info too.

Otherwise I can recommend EASEUS Partition Master Home Edition which is free and also have extended error checking features. One tool that might come through.

http://www.partition-tool.com/landing/home-upgrade.htm

I have that. It came on the computer. Thanks, I will explore this.

Seatools is free.

http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/seatools/

So is HDTune.

http://www.hdtune.com/

for thirty days...


There are many many others.

If it is a disk problem - one of these should point it out.

Very often these things come up and mean nothing.

But.

Only a fool would not have his hard drive imaged and backed up.

I have drives I tease - they are on their last legs. I torture them. Like a sadist would a fly. And still, they come back to life, spluttering, wheezing.
I then torture them some more. Maybe this says more about my personality than the longevity of hard drives.

It could be your hd is about to go tits up.
Back the bugger up. Millions of free back up programs - many pointers on KVR.


Do some kind of check with software that has S.M.A.R.T. Technology.

That will give you the most info you are likely to get.

Any warning is a good time to do the things you shoulda done in the first place.


Don't panic. Just clone your drive and get the data off. You will be fine.

Checked it with Easus and it passed. Now I'm thinking it has something to do with Network Mapping, or the WD Smartware software (or both)

I have similar system specs, I move enough files off the XP partition,
to another drive, so that 80% is free, then run chkdsk and defrag,
and there is very little data to juggle. I read the log, and move any
remaining fragmented files, and defrag one more time, then copy
back what is needed, to a pristine platter. Then it's a good time to image
the nice setup.
Cheers

And, of course, whatever malfunction that was is gone. Explorer is zipping around like an ice skater now. Haven't tried the dskchk again, but maybe I'll do that today.
Now I'm starting to think something was hogging CPU and couldn't finish it. It was bad too. I was in FL and on the Save File dialog it took forever for the Folder screen to appear and become cohesive. It was just not working right.