Hard drive damage

[holymoly]

Doing a defrag using System Mechanic Professional 5.5 and get a message to the effect of "could not complete defrag as hard drive may have damage. Do a CHKDSK/f in DOS to fix or repair hard drive".

I did the CHDSK/F and got no message to the effect of any damage.

Went to this site: http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm
and downloaded DFT "Drive Fitness Test" onto a floppy. Upon a reboot, the test was done in DOS and after completion, there was no diagnostic indicating anything at fault.

I have Windows XP, and find the computer can be quite slow at times, even after defrag, adaware Pro adaware scan, and AVG Pro 7 virus scan, and Spybot.

Any other diagnosis that was missed?

 

[crjdriver]

I do not put much faith in those third party utilities. You already have disk checking and defrag utilities in xp.

If the drive passed the mfg's check and passed chkdsk /r from the recovery console, I would not worry too much about the drive.

As to slow running, post your exact specs ie cpu, amount of ram, video card, ect.

 

[holymoly]

Pentium 4 CPU 1.6 Ghz
224 MB ram

Legacy Video capture devices?
media control devices
MPU-401 Compatible MIDI device?
Virtual memory 360 MB (too low?)

 

[Elvandil]

Can you run a thorough chkdsk /r on that drive from the Recovery Console? What are the results?

 

[crjdriver]

With your amount of ram, I would suspect that is the cause of slow running. 224 is about the min [especially if sp2 is installed with its extra services]

If you are spyware / trojan clean, you might want to increase the amount of ram. It is very cheap at the moment.

 

[4steve44]

Pentium 4 CPU 1.6 Ghz
224 MB ram

Legacy Video capture devices?
media control devices
MPU-401 Compatible MIDI device?
Virtual memory 360 MB (too low?)

What motherboard are you running?

 

[holymoly]

With your amount of ram, I would suspect that is the cause of slow running. 224 is about the min [especially if sp2 is installed with its extra services]

If you are spyware / trojan clean, you might want to increase the amount of ram. It is very cheap at the moment.

Yes SP2 is installed. 512RAM or double should do it?

Will try chkdsk/r

 

[crjdriver]

512 is enough unless you are doing some very intensive CAD / MAYA type of work.

Note if you have onboard type video, it uses system ram for video ram. If that is your case, you might want to limit the video ram to 64 meg or less. If you install a 512 chip in addition to what you have now, you will have more than enough.

I thought you had already run chkdsk /r Perhaps I misread your post.

 

[Elvandil]

512 is enough unless you are doing some very intensive CAD / MAYA type of work.

Note if you have onboard type video, it uses system ram for video ram. If that is your case, you might want to limit the video ram to 64 meg or less. If you install a 512 chip in addition to what you have now, you will have more than enough.

I thought you had already run chkdsk /r Perhaps I misread your post.

I thought it was just /f that was tried.

In any case, don't forget the space after chkdsk, holymoly. It's:
chkdsk /r(in case that wasn't just a typo).

 

[holymoly]

tried chkdsk /r and diagnostic message is:
Cannot lock current drive.

Chkdsk cannot work because the volume is in use by another process.

The motherboard is PC400 systemboard

M965 Series, V1.6
S650

 

[crjdriver]

That is because windows is running. Boot with your xp cd [CD set as first boot device in the bios] and run the command from the recovery console. If you run the command from the cmd prompt in windows, it should give you the option to run it on the next boot. That is another way to do the job.