searcherrr

XP SP2 is my setup; Athlon 64 3.2ghz / 2gb RAM

Power was lost and so I had cause to run chkdsk c: /f/r/x on reboot.
It sat there for a lot longer than normal at 3% on either part 3 or part 4 of 5 (sorry can't remember which part). There were no errors about anything wrong, but I figured it had just hung and unlike me I tried to abort it with usual keystrokes.

Then the screen started scrolling at blazing speed about "cannot fix" or "cannot write" ..."bad sectors" etc.. hard to read it all while it was scrolling.

I powered it off then and ran chkdsk in read only mode and saw 4kb in bad sectors.

In disbelief I ran HDD Regenerator from Hiren's Boot CD 8.1 (older version, but should be current enough I believe). Last I saw HDD Regen. was at 72% of the drive and had not found any bad sectors. 3 hours later I came back and my laptop was powered OFF and no one had touched it.

What does this mean? Does HDD Regenerator turn off the PC when its done? That would be very good to know in this case.

The laptop seems to be running fine, but in my experience any bad sectors found is a begun path to a nice RIP for a hard drive. I just don't know if I can believe chkdsk (since I stopped it in the middle of its "thing") or HDD Regen (cause I never saw it complete).

Chkdsk has been mostly reliable for me over time, but sometimes is a lil flaky. I'm wondering if when I stopped it if I caused an irregularity in the file system structure.

Windows Defrag reports it cannot defrag "some" files and to check the report for which ones, but in the report there is a "NONE" listed under the section of files that can't be defragged. The graphic though shows 2 small red areas that weren't defragged and prior to defragging I had eliminated the pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys as well to get a good clean defrag.

I'm going to run chkdsk c: /f/r/x again and let it complete no matter how many hours it takes this time and then run HDD Regenerator again and then I'll post back.

I just wanted some people's opinions in the meantime though. I know this is really long, so thanks for reading.


Some background that led to this:
I'm an extreme power user in more ways than one. At any given moment I may have a mix of as many as 30 to 50 web pages, windows, or programs open.

Lately I have been noticing my processor spiking continuously and the CPU fans constantly climbing to their highest speed. I run SpeedFan so I can watch temps and I noticed the other day my core temp got up to 181F. Just a few moments later my system completely turned off with ZERO WARNING. It was as if someone had ripped the battery out while not plugged into ac adapter. This is the 2nd time this has happened.

I began to think about why and I notice especially when I open new web pages (on Ebay mostly lately) that the fans and temp are way up high. After this complete warningless shutdown I installed "FlashBlock 1.5" for FireFox (there's an IE version as well) because the pages I'd open I am noticing a lot more than ever today the internet is saturated densely with Flash apps popping up, over and under all the time. These apps (using FireFox 2 with latest updates except for the flash player which needs to be updated) were causing HUGE resource drains of CPU to 100% almost constantly. With FlashBlock installed I rarely even get the FANS to spin to their highest speed now except when I open 3 or more web pages simultaneously.

linderman

sounds to me like your cpu is overheating which can cause auto shutdowns

remove any dust @ the cpu fan .............


download the drive manufacturers bootable hard drive diagnostic program (free) and run that to check the drive for mechanical health ............... back up any critical data ASAP




read my sig about chkdsk !!!!!!!!!!!

searcherrr

linderman - I love your sig. I recently became aware of BIOS flashing in Windows. I didn't like the "feel" of the idea either. Good to know I should stick to DOS or whatever else to do it. I see now BIOS have a built-in flashing utility too, which I'm sure is the best method.

Thanks for your info. I have never dusted this laptop and I figured I needed to now that all this is going on.

I reran chkdsk c: /f/r/x and it is still showing 4kb bad sectors, but at least this time the command completed and whatever it needed to do to the file system to mark everything off is done. I'll run HDD regen tonight when I go to bed and see what it does.

linderman

back up any data that you deem important and get your hard drive funeral arrangements made !