CHKDSK problems

[Holly21057]

About 3 days ago, I was on my computer. I tried to switch out of my login to a different one, and I got the blue screen of death. Since then, every time I have tried to boot it up, it will get all the way into booting up, but right before the login screen would normally come up, CHKDSK begins running. The lines on the Windows XP blue startup screen say
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Checking the file system on c:
The file system is NTFS
The volumes is dirty

CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 3)...
File verification complete.
CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 3)...
8 percent completed.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
It will only get to 8 percent before freezing. I'm very worried that this means that my computer has been hit by a virus, or my hard drive is dying. The computer did this a while back, maybe 2 or 3 months ago, but after a few reboots, it was fine. Even if the computer is dead, is there some way to safely extract my files?

 

[rf6647]

........Even if the computer is dead, is there some way to safely extract my files?

For this situation I recommend using a CD based program to ‘recover lost data’. It requires the use of an additonal hard drive (or large capacity flash drive of suffcient size).

My discussion of usage for Recover Lost Data by Stompsoft. 'Trial Version' refers to another program.

More writes to this HDD make it harder to recover files. The dirty bit is present for this drive. Windows always runs chkdsk under this condition. Based on my recollection (since I did not find a suitable reference), ‘chkdsk /r’ from the Recovery Console (xp installation cd) handles the dirty bit.

Crashes during chkdsk has many meanings. RAM failures top the list. Usually, double fault conditions are not likely. RAM failures can crash programs that under rare circumstances corrupt files during a save.

Guides here discussing 'crashes & sudden reboots' may give a comprehensive troubleshooting view for you to consider.

 

[noorman]

About 3 days ago, I was on my computer. I tried to switch out of my login to a different one, and I got the blue screen of death. Since then, every time I have tried to boot it up, it will get all the way into booting up, but right before the login screen would normally come up, CHKDSK begins running. The lines on the Windows XP blue startup screen say
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Checking the file system on c:
The file system is NTFS
The volumes is dirty

CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 3)...
File verification complete.
CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 3)...
8 percent completed.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
It will only get to 8 percent before freezing. I'm very worried that this means that my computer has been hit by a virus, or my hard drive is dying. The computer did this a while back, maybe 2 or 3 months ago, but after a few reboots, it was fine. Even if the computer is dead, is there some way to safely extract my files?

.


First, you can always check your disk status via a free disk Diagnostic from your harddrive maker, from DOS level (which excludes viruses created for Windows) / they exist as CD iso and Floppy based iso too.

After that, you can find free anti-virus tools that run also from DOS environments (CDROM based f.e.)

That should get you fixed and safe in not a lot of time !

As suggested before me, you could go with the Windows installation CD and the Recovery Console to run 'chkdsk /r <drive letter>' from a DOS box (command line) / that works very well too and also runs outside of Windows (DOS level) !
Chkdsk /r does a search for bad clusters, excludes them permanently and tries to save the data found in them/ repair !


.

 

[mflynn]

What you need to try first is to F8 and boot to Safe Mode and see if the Chkdsk completes.

Mike