Troubling Hard Drive issues.

[Britt]

My friend Kildarre, who you all might know, asked me to post this.

<b>Imnotusnit</b>: Got any really smart tech friends?
<b>Britt</b>: Not exactly.. Why?
<b>Imnotusnit</b> wants to directly connect.
<b>Imnotusnit</b> is now directly connected.
<b>Imnotusnit</b>: [15:36]

[mirc log...]

( Kildarre ) Either of you possibly any good at HD stuff?
[15:36] *** Kildarre1 has quit IRC (Quit: Leaving)
[15:36] ( OpenFriday ) depends on the problem
[15:36] ( OpenFriday ) what sort of troubles are you having?
[15:37] ( Kildarre ) Well, I think I have a virus that Norton isn't detecting. I want to move all my stuff from one HD to my old one (more room). I started with 3.5 GB free. Deleted a lot of stuff and had 6.0 GB free. When I restarted, it was 3.5 GB free again. Scandisk won't work, giving me a memory error, no matter what mode I run it in. I assume the problem is the clusters report themselves as full even with all the data deleted.
[15:38] ( OpenFriday ) what kind of memory error? did you try in dos?
[15:38] ( OpenFriday ) what os?
[15:39] ( Kildarre ) Tried it in DOS, yeah.
[15:39] ( Kildarre ) Windows 98 on the first HD, Windows ME on the old one.
[15:39] ( Kildarre ) Tried Scandisking in both OSes, nothing.
[15:39] ( Kildarre ) It doesn't tell me what kind of memory error.
[15:39] ( Kildarre ) It just says "There is not enough memory to run Scandisk. Close one or more programs then press retry"
[15:39] *** Tweakgull has joined #techchat
[15:40] ( Kildarre ) But even with nearly everything terminated it still doesn't run.
[15:40] ( OpenFriday ) gull
[15:40] ( Tweakgull ) wup all
[15:40] ( Kildarre ) Even in Safe Modee.
[15:40] ( Kildarre ) Hey Tweakgull.
[15:40] ( Final-Reality ) may be a harddrive failure
[15:41] ( Final-Reality ) if it went from 6GB to 3.5GB who knows if its just not reporting it properly or what
[15:41] ( Kildarre ) I don't think so. I can still access everything, everything works fine, etc., this just won't work properly.
[15:41] ( Kildarre ) FR, I'm saying it reverted back to what it was before I touched anytihng
[15:42] ( Kildarre ) It showed the changes and deletes as being made before a restart, but from what I can tell went back to the exact same number of bytes it was before I touched it.
[15:42] ( OpenFriday ) sounds like the fat tables are just out of sync... scandisk would fix that if it would run
[15:43] ( OpenFriday ) or i think there was a virus called the space filler virus going around... not sure what the sympotoms of that were tho
[15:43] ( Kildarre ) That's what frustrates me. I can't run Scandisk.

[end mirc log.. ]

<b>Britt</b>: Wow.
<b>Britt</b>: *knows nothing about that stuff* Unne or Bleys might, but that's just a shot in the dark.
<b>Imnotusnit</b>: Then ask them please.
<b>Britt</b>: They're not online, but you could always PM them.
<b>Imnotusnit</b>: Could you?
<b>Britt</b>: Sure. Actually, I'll make a thread about it. Faster, that way.

Any advice?

[crono_logical]

You've got <B>both</B> Win98 <I>and</I> WinME on the same machine? What sort of boot manager are you using? Or aren't you?

[Britt]

Kildarre: I'm not. If I want to use one or the other, I just switch the boot order in CMOS. I adopted this setup just a day or two ago, and am still deciding what I want.

[crono_logical]

That doesn't sound good - you've probably got both hard drives 'active' if you can simply swap the boot order in the BIOS without a boot manager. There should only ever be one 'active' partition in a computer across all hard drives. Otherwise, you can expect to get data loss because having more than one active partition confuses some versions of Windows if you keep swapping OS like that.

Chances are that the FAT tables on the disk aren't updating properly because of this - you change something, but when you reboot into the other OS, it chages it back from a (older) copy of the FAT because it thinks something is wrong.

First go into the BIOS, choose the disk you want to boot from e.g. Win98, then boot into that OS. Then run FDISK, and 'set active' that same OS's partition - this will disable the other OS and this problem shouldn't happen. If you want to dual-boot between WinME and Win98, you need a boot manager of some sort (e.g. BootMagic), it changes the active partition and disables the other on the fly when you boot up to avoid this sort of conflict in the FAT tables.

Of course, there <I>is</I> a possiblity of a virus, but if you've got the latest version of Norton, it should have been detected - there doesn't seem to be any recent viruses on anti-virus web pages which cause that problem.


PS Stick with Win98

[Endless]

Just in case you can't run Scandisk in Win mode, create a floppy with a few tools, so that you can boot from it. I know for sure that Win98 can make one, it's in control panel, add/remove prog, last tab. When the floppy is done, check that it has scandisk.exe in it, change the little lock to protect it against writing, and reboot with the floppy. Now you'll be able to run scandisk.

However, I *think* that Crono is right.

[Citizen Bleys]

If you want a free boot loader, see if you can't find a port of LILO or Grub. Although "LILO" stands for "Linux Loader", you CAN run it without dual-booting with Linux--Once LILO is installed, it doesn't check to see what kind of OS's you're booting into...problem is, if there's no port, you'd have to run a Linux setup program (Don't complete the setup if you don't want Linux, just go as far as installing LILO in the MBR). Select /dev/hda1 as the boot partition for Win98, and /dev/hdb1 for the boot partition for WinME, and then delete the default Linux partition, since you won't be installing Linux. (by the way: /dev/hda1 and /dev/hdb1 assumes that your hard drives are the primary master (IDE channel 1) and primary slave, respectively.

As for your virus: Well, I haven't had much trouble with viruses, since they primarily attack through Microsoft Outlook, which I don't use, but I HAVE had problems with disk space being reported incorrectly. Scandisk will detect and solve the problem.

If it says it doesn't have enough memory to run scandisk, it means you have too many memory resident tools. Like crono_logical said, make a boot disk--but remove any lines in config.sys referring to atapi_cd.sys, or any similar Real-Mode CD-ROM drivers (If you don't use DOS, go into config.sys on your C: and rem out the real-mode CD-ROM drivers--'Doze uses 32-bit CD-ROM drivers that don't suck up your conventional memory).
Also remove any lines calling a mouse driver from autoexec.bat. After that--you don't even need scandisk on the floppy--you can run it from your hard drive, as long as you cold-booted (and I mean COLD-boot--turn the computer off and wait for 60 seconds MINIMUM).

the problem with "not enough memory" has nothing to do with the DIMMs in your machine--it's referring to DOS's old 640k conventional memory limit. No matter what, you can't get more than 640k of conventional memory, and low-level tools usually can't use extended/expanded memory.

[Dr Unne]

You could rem out pretty much everything in your autoexec and config.sys files and boot straight to a DOS prompt without loading Windows. If you hit F8 after your keyboard initializes but before the Windows logo screen pops up, it'll give you a menu; I think option 6 is "Command prompt". You might be able to run the DOS version of Scandisk from there even if you can't run it from Windows, since win.com and whatnot won't be sitting resident in the background, like they are if you start a DOS prompt from Windows. I don't really know though. I've never had a virus either. I guess it could be a virus. Trying to boot from a floppy is also a good idea, like other people mentioned.

If all else fails, you could always format your drives.

[crono_logical]

Originally posted by Dr Unne
I think option 6 is "Command prompt".

If you go for that option, its actually "Safe Mode Command Prompt Only" you want, it'll be 5 or 6 depending if you're networked etc.