[frawdav]

I decided to restart my computer because it was running a bit slow, but it refused to shut down. Eventually, I just went ahead and killed the power and restarted it. When it came back up, I got a message saying that my C: drive had to be "checked for consistency." I tried hitting a key to skip the CHKDSK, but it ignored the input and started the CHKDSK. The file verificiation passed quickly. The index vertification, however, hung up at 2% and refused to move. I gave up after about 15 minutes of it sitting there, and tried booting the box up again - with the exact same result. It would let me skip the CHKDSK and it hangs up at 2% on the index verification every time.

I guess I have a few questions:

1. Why is it not accepting my keyboard input and skipping the CHKDSK?
2. What would be causing it to hang up during the index verfication?
3. Is there any way for me to get into the box without having to go put together a boot disk?
4. Any ideas what the overall problem is and how to best address it?

I would really appreciate any help I can get on this, because right now I am hosed and that is a definite problem.

Thanks!

[zabusant]

Well, it could be a faulty hard drive, don't know why it's not taking input from keyboard, but try leaving it over-night. I had a simmilar problem, it took about 4 hours to get through, but it did fix it.

[frawdav]

I sooooo don't want it to be a hardware failure. Replacing a C: drive is just never fun. I suppose I could just be being impatient with it. I usually don't think of an index verification as something that should take all that long, but there are a lot of files on the disk and maybe the indexes are just a lot bigger than I am used to. I'll leave it going overnight and see if it decides to ever move. (I still find it very odd that it ignores the keyboard - especially because I went into Setup and it was accepting my keystrokes just fine.) I really appreciate your input.

Anyone else have any experience with this problem or any other ideas about what it might be?

[frawdav]

Ok, I am officially an idiot. I was just being too impatient. After sitting on 2% for about 20 minutes, it started moving again and powered right through the rest of the CHKDSK and booted right up. I hate it that I just spent an hour or two needlessly stressed, but this is a much better outcome than HD failure! Thank you very much for your help!

[zabusant]

Glad to have helped!

[curlybones]

Thanks to zabusant from curlybones, also. I ran into the same problem as frawdav except that mine was hung on 0% on the indexes. After reading the thread, I let the unit sit for about 90 minutes and then it took off and here I am. My drive is 250 GB about 85% loaded and contains about 1600 photo albums with about 80,000 photos as well as my genealogy. I was sure that I was dead meat! I keep my drive c: cloned to drive d: using casper xp but I had not done a copy in many, many months, possibly a year. I am copying it this very moment and will never let it lapse again. Thanks a million for spending the time to help us dummies.
Curlybones

[PantherDave]

I just spent awhile recovering a lost partition with testdisk and fixing the MBR, and finally got XP booting again when this came up. Its been at 0% for about a half hour. It's reassuring to hear that it fixed itself for you guys, so I'll just try not to stress and go do something else for awhile...

[PantherDave]

Yay! Everything's back to normal. Don't know what caused this, but don't really care anymore. Thanks!