freaky chkdsk..

That is exactly why you are not finding any faults when you run diagnostics - you have an intermittant problem that isn't playing up when you are running the diagnostics. The only way you will catch that error, is when it becomes a hard failure, and remains in the fail mode.

I am still inclined to believe that your hard drive is the issue here, so I recommend running the maker's diagnostic tools (run all tests) several times in succession, to see if any errors show up. I can't think of much else you can do right now, but maybe stressing your drive by repeated testing, will cause the errors to become more apparent. If you can get hold of a SMART monitoring program, and leave it active in your system tray, it will record any errors reported by you drive while in use. Then you can look at the history logs to see if any issues cropped up.

I have the exact same problem with the same system... been trying to fix this for six months without luck...

I have both a 200GB WD PATA and a 200GB WD SATA drive... both have the same problem... I also have a 120GB (Seagate) drive and two 80GB drives (WD) who causes no problems

I have tried everything... and nothing works... tempted to buy a new motherboard... since the drives work fine on another motherboard.

Check out this MSKB article, it sounds like your problem and has a fix.

331958 - Hard Disk May Become Corrupted When Entering Standby or Hibernation or When Writing a Memory Dump

sorry Had a look at it... but it does not really address my problem...

I fixed the problem ... or at least I think so.. cannot force the error anymore...

well the solution was simple enough... I wiped my harddrive clean and reinstalled windows... but this time I pressed F6 during setup to install the raid drivers before it installed windows at all... I also got Abit to make me a new bios (!?) with the newest HTP374 bios included... so after both the motherboard and windows started running on version 3.03 of the bios ...everything is sweet.

Man this is the problem I'm having exactly. And I also have 2 WD 200GB drives that are doing it. I have the latest Bios for the Motherboard and the Latest Hard Drive drivers and windows updates. I've Checked both drives repeatedly and they check out fine. Memory has been checked and it's fine. Bought new motherboard, power supply, video card, cables, and case, still same problem. No other drives (80GB or 100GB) have this problem, just the big ones. Sure could use some help here if anyone has any. I found this thread doing google search. This seems like a great forum. -- Rick
I did find some info that might have something to do with this about folders with frequent file adding and deleting having this problem - but this is an older Windows NT post - not sure how this works with XP.

do you have a via chipset? have you tried a different controller... maybe the two motherboards you had used same chipset?

my problem has well and truly gone away...and it seems to be due to the bios for the chipset having having to be the same version as the drivers in windows.... and the drivers in windows (that were the same version as the latest bios) had issues... whilst the newest drivers (which had no bios equivallent) was ok.

so they had to make a new bios... go figure.

we have established that it was not a memory problem...have we established that the windows itself is not corrupted. I have been wanting to go back to windows 98 because on 2000 and XP home and pro i have experienced problems similar to this. I have tried and tried and have now resorted to repartitioning and reinstalling windows on my computer every 6 months. I hate windows it seems like it is meant to corrupt after a year.

I think it might be an NTFS related issue

I did try a different controller card. Have one drive on a controller card and the other drive on the motherboard. Both failed. The motherboard chipsed is intel. This is an ASUS board. There shouldn't be any problem with that. The previous board was a Dell. I never had this problem with 98 or with XP when I was using FAT 32. I coverted all my drives to NTFS because it seemed to be so much more efficient (512 culsters instead of 8k and 16k) but now I loose data all the time :-( I'm trying to recover some right now with Stellar Phoenix but a lot of files come out corrupted. Has anyone had this trouble with non Western-Digital drives? Seems to be a common denominator. WD large drive and NTFS. I have both Windows 2000 and XP dual boot system and have re-installed both from scratch after re-formatting. I didn't do raid driver install because I'm using IDE on board and IDE promise controller card TX 100.
No - I don't have a via chipset. I remember reading about that. I wonder if it could be a similar problem though. I was wondering if it could have anything to do with windows 2000 using different file ID's than XP in the MFT. Anyone know anything about this? When recovering I found two files for each file and one had an ID in the 4k range and the other in the 8k range. Don't have a clue what that's all about hehe.

I had the problem whilst I was running it of the RAID controller...

I don't think it is anything to do with the 137GB barrier thing... cause I started corrupting the WD harddrive once I passed 100 or so GB... but the 120GB harddrives I had could be filled to the brim... but they are not WD.... hmm.

.. it would be interesting if you could borrow an external cabinet, and place the drive inside there... and connect it to the USB port... that way, if it works... we should be able to conclude it is not a NTFS problem, nor it is a WD problem.... if it doesn't work on the other hand... we can conclude it is not a controller problem.

Question for Rick

Hey Rick - when you were having the same problem was it also with only large WD drives above 137 GB? We all seem to have that in common. Also could a memory problem only affect large drives ya think? Man that memory check program takes a long time! hehe

Re: Question for Rick

Not me... cause it happened as soon as a drive reached about 100-110GB... not 137GB

Thanks Rick, tokr

Thanks Rick, for that url for the memory test program. I ran that today for 10 hours but no errors were found. I guess that's good news and bad news hehe. And thanks tokr for that info. Interesting. I have two 100GB drives (WD) that never had any problems. It could have something to do with too many files maybe. Did everyone who had this problem have a lot of smaller files in the directories that got lost? I did find some interesting things on microsoft site about XP having a problem with large drives when computer goes into power management modes, I also found some interesting info about folders where files are frequently added and deleted in NTFS. But no solutions yet. Do you think simply partitioning the 200GB in two would help? Still researching.

Update - think I got it licked

Again thanks for the suggestions guys, I thought I'd do a follow up post of what I did so any others who might be having this problem might solve it too. My setup is intel chipset and promise ata tx2 100 controller cards - I partitioned my 200gb drives in half- not sure this was necessary but figured it couldn't hurt, I edited the registry to increase the MFT reserved space on the drive - (this only takes place after you reformat however) here's the url for this info: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q174619. I did this because the MFT reserved space is real small (16%) by default and increasing the size does not make you lose disc space - it just uses that space last. This keeps your MFT from being too fragmented when you have a lot of files or do a lot of deleting and moving. I then copied all the data from each drive one at a time to another drive and then formatted the drives using 4096 sector size NTFS. I also downloaded and installed the Intel application accelerator driver which seems to take place of the Atapi sys driver - So far no problems at all - Rick

I thought I was the only one to have this issue. Thank God for the internet.

Anyway, I just purchased a new 250GB Western Digital SATA drive last month. I have had nothing but problems with it. From the installation to the unusual sounds it makes booting up, to the problem of the checkdisk, it has been one nightmare after another. Here is my system configuration:

WinXP Pro, SP1, fully updated
Abit MB
2GB PC2700
ATI Radeon AIW 8500DV
Sound Blaster Audigy 2
120GB SATA (Seagate) *boot drive
250GB SATA (WD) *storage drive

When I originally setup the new WD drive, I partitioned it into a 120GB (F) and 130GB (G) drive. While I have RAID capabilities on my system, I am not using it. I move files back and forth between 3 different physical drives in 2 different systems because I do digital editing. I ran a full checkdisk recently, and got the "deleting orphan files" message during the procedure. At first, this didn't seem to be a problem. My files were still on the G drive (the 130GB partition). For some reason, every time I boot up, checkdisk runs on that partition. My guess is that it never actually finished, who knows? However, yesterday it ran checkdisk again, and when I went into My Computer to access the drive, there was nothing there. The drive showed that 50GB of it was used, but there was nothing in the drive!!! I tried exploring the drive; there was nothing there. And yet it shows that space is being used. I have not really backed up this drive, because this IS my backup drive. I have 6 months worth of video projects on this. My first concern is data recovery. My second concern is what to do about the drive. Any help is greatly appreciated.

frawress

Hi,

I just ran into this problem today. I have a brand new Maxtor 160gb HD. I'd just filled it up to about 110 gb and started having problems so I rebooted. Chkdsk starts running and starts deleting everything. The drive was formatted as a single partition using NTFS.

I was wondering if anyone has recovered their data and what programs they used. I was also wondering if anyone has run into this problem using Fat32 or if this is an NTFS problem only.

This is strange because I've been using a 120gb with no problems and this drive is only three weeks old. Anyone got any solutions?

I'm using Windows 2k Pro Sp4 with an Intel P4 system.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I got same problem as most of us here...

I bought new 160 Maxtor less then month ago. Today morning I started to have some problems with it, one directory said "Directory is corrupted and cannot be shown" (or something like that).
I started to browse if other directories are also corrupted, yes some were but some was working.

I thinked if reboot would fix it. I rebooted system and answered NO when Windows wanted to run ChkDisk on my system.
(Btw, that disk was my H:-drive, so no system on it)

Well, windows didn't saw any filesystem on it, windows just told me that filesystem was "RAW", so it was unreadable.
I was forced to reboot, and I did allow chkdisk to check it.

Can someone guess what happened? Yep, "Deleting orphan file ....." And 7GB of data is left of 130GB ... Can someone guess if I have any backups? Correct again, no I don't.

Well, I was quite pissed because that really is not HARDWARE failure, I'm REALLY sure about it. I called to Microsoft support today.

Microsoft opened new case, and after few hours they called me back, we was talking over and hour.
He (tech guy from Microsoft) was friendly (I really was bit supriced), but didn't had any recovery solution for me. We was browsing net together, and even readed all messages from here (I'm really sure that problem is in windows filesystem, but they don't want to admit it). He said that there is no other cases with this similiar problem,
so am I only one who is brave enought to contact Microsoft with this problem? :blush:

I like to know if people has found out more of this problem, so we can point out this really is Windows (NT, 2K, XP and 2K3?) problem! Every symptoms and reports seems to point that problem is PARTITION over 137GB (NTFS), and is not really related to ATAPI driver.
Has anyone got this problem corrected without resizing partitions to be less then 137gb? Or does someone have problems even with those small partitions and big disks?

I have Windows XP PRO SP1 and 3*80+120+160 drives, and only that 160 is having problems now.


Well, here is some other links about this problem (some are from here):
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;Q169404
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;Q303013
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;Q331958

Recovering?
http://www.tek-tips.com/gpviewthread.cfm/qid/725704/pid/528/lev2/7/lev3/50

Still no problems yet...

I posted earlier that I re-formatted my drives specifying that they reserve more space for the mft. The link to what that's all about is in my post. So far no problems anymore but it did take a long time to do all my drives. I had to buy another drive - this time I got a 120GB and made back-ups of other drives using Norton Ghost, then reformatted the drives with the 4096 sector size in partitions of less than 100GB after I put the entry in the registry to reserve the extra space. My suspicion is that the current large drive/driver/file system/operating system's capabilites have a breakdown when you have a lot of small files, or several real large files, or even a mixture possibly, and/or your drive is almost full, the MFT becomes so fragmented it fails. This is just my theory however and I am NO tech whatsoever hehe. I just wanted to share that I have still had no problems since I did this and I was having problems about every other day before.
As far as recovery, I have not been able to get all of my data back but I was able to get a lot of it. I was able to recover some data with a program called Stellar Phoenix NTFS/FAT32, but a lot of the files were corrupt. The program was $150 and has only a year license then you have to buy it again I didn't realize that when I bought it. I also bought another program called Restorer 2000 and it seems to work pretty good but probably not as good as the Stellar-Phoenix but it was only $50 - a much better price, and seems to work pretty well. Good luck.

if you guys are running windows xp or 2k, did you guys enable large system cache? that corrupts hard drives with radeon and nvidia graphics cards.

i got the same orphan file deleted chkdsk crazy stuff happening when i enabled large system cache with windows xp pro. chkdsk would keep running chkdsk over and over again, ruining my data. do not use large system cache.