Screwball HD problem

Phoenix-D

Ok, I have two partitions in my main system, C and E. C is 30GB and mainly holds Windows XP and the swap file; E is 130 GB.

All is well until one of the last Automatic Updates borked XP somehow. Among other things it made it so right-click access to My Computer didn't work anymore. No problem; I just wiped C and reinstalled Windows. That's why the drive is split to begin with. Reinstall, patch back up, all seems to be fine.

That's when the problem popped up. I have a few files that have been "corrupted". If I try to delete them, Windows errors out: Cannot delete (filename): The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable." It also popped up with the "your system needs to be checked" prompt when I rebooted, but if I let it run Chkdsk goes into an infinite loop and never finishes. Same if I run it from Windows.

The really odd part is all these files are fine. All the data is there, the music files can be played without problems, I can move them around fine, etc. I just can't delete any of them.

Any ideas? I've never seen Windows do this before.

thatnerdyguy

Could be that your hard drive is getting borked. Download and run DFT, it can analyse the disk and see if anything's wrong with the physical media. If it's a Hitachi disk, it'll give specific failure codes. Worth a shot anyhow to see if it's a hardware problem.

Phoenix-D

I'll try that, thanks. The only testers I had handy were floppy-only, and I don't have a 3.5 drive.

Eat_Fire

sounds like text book hard drive failure.