Windows XP chkdsk question

[morgoth]

Hopefully someone here will have an answer for me, saves me having to try and find some Windows forum, and I trust you guys know more about Windows than those types anyways.

Getting a bunch of page errors on 1 of the disks:

The device, \Device\Scsi\ultra1, did not respond within the timeout period.

Now, I have a complex drive setup, with a dvd-rom drive, cd-rw drive, and dvd-r drive, as well as a 30gb hdd, 80gb hdd and 300gb hdd. So - I'm using a promise controller (the one that's ata133 compliant, can't remember the model number). The dvd-r and 300gb drive are attached to the promise controller, the rest are attached the motherboards onboard controllers.

Windows' device naming policy is shite, I can't for the life of me confirm what \device\scsi\ultra1 is the 300gb drive, but I suspect it is. I really hate the way that Windows event viewer uses a particular terminology that isn't used anywhere else - consistency problems really annoy me.

Anyways, I've downloaded western digitals diagnostic tools, and ran both short and extended tests on all 3 hdds, they all come up fine. I've rebooted and ran chkdsk during startup for the main 80gb drive (from which Windows boots from). It seems to have come up OK:

A disk check has been scheduled.
Windows will now check the disk.
Cleaning up minor inconsistencies on the drive.
Cleaning up 13 unused index entries from index $SII of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 13 unused index entries from index $SDH of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 13 unused security descriptors.
CHKDSK is verifying file data (stage 4 of 5)...
File data verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying free space (stage 5 of 5)...
Free space verification is complete.
CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in the
master file table (MFT) bitmap.
Windows has made corrections to the file system.

78140128 KB total disk space.
58114900 KB in 130142 files.
45108 KB in 9578 indexes.
0 KB in bad sectors.
225436 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
19754684 KB available on disk.

4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
19535032 total allocation units on disk.
4938671 allocation units available on disk.

Internal Info:
10 4f 02 00 d3 21 02 00 a5 34 03 00 00 00 00 00 .O...!...4......
0f 09 00 00 01 00 00 00 e2 03 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................
30 a1 b1 04 00 00 00 00 d6 4e 0d 64 00 00 00 00 0........N.d....
e4 46 ac 0a 00 00 00 00 d6 1a 93 bc 05 00 00 00 .F..............
22 23 31 1f 01 00 00 00 6c d2 45 56 07 00 00 00 "#1.....l.EV....
99 9e 36 00 00 00 00 00 b0 3a 07 00 5e fc 01 00 ..6......:..^...
00 00 00 00 00 50 0d db 0d 00 00 00 6a 25 00 00 .....P......j%..

Windows has finished checking your disk.
Please wait while your computer restarts.

The 30gb drive I scanned from within Windows since Windows wasn't using it. Event viewer doesn't show any log for the scan, and it didn't give me any informational results on the scan either. I have no idea if chkdsk keeps logs of scans or where, a quickish google search found *uck all on the subject.

The 300gb drive refuses to scan. Chkdsk won't do it from within windows GUI, or from a dos prompt. It just says it can't scan it after a period of time. I haven't tried doing a check via a reboot yet (that's planned for tonight).

Any suggestion(s) on why chkdsk won't scan it from within windows? Could it be that it doesn't like the drive cos it's attached to a ide controller card? I'm probably going to boot off Knoppix and run a fsck on it as well, although the drive is formatted with ntfs so not much I can really do there...

Furthermore, my system is (OK guys I know you're going to enjoy this), running like a dog of late. spybot shows its clean, Microsoft's own anti spyware software is set to scan at 2am every night, last few times it hasn't scanned, with an error message that something stopped it or it encountered an error. services.exe service is also having issues. Also, event viewer sees entdrv51.sys (a file used by Mcaffee anti virus software enterprise 8i which we use on the network here) as being spyware and as being stopped from accessing the net. This is only a new problem according to event viewer. I've googled a bit, and it seems that this file can be used by some forms of spyware and malware. I'm going to get the network admin to do a scan of my host for viruses from the server end, just in case.

Windows stability has been up the creek for the past month or so, and I suspect it's a direct result of having to create a new profile when the domain controller domain was updated by Warren a few months back. I'm not very happy with Windows stability at all, but sadly, I don't have much choice. I've paid good money for certain pieces of software (Photoshop CS2 and Neat Image) and they run only in Windows. I refuse to fork out money for things like CrossOver office or dual boot a system. If Adobe Photoshop CS2 and Neat Image were ported to Linux I'd be back in Linux land in an instant, I've had a gutful of Windows. It's fucked up more times in 7 months than Linux did in 4 and a half years, with a tonne more applications installed and a shitload more updates. Windows XP is just not robust or reliable enough.

Anyways, any suggestions on the chkdsk issue are appreciated.

Cheers,

Dave

[viator]

Since my newyears resolution was not to help people with windows anymore i cant be of assistance really but as you stated scan it using knoppix and if that doesnt work hook the drive up directly and scan it.

[fos]

I'm sorry but I have pretty much avoided MS since Win2000. I struggle with it in my classroom every day. This year, teachers don't have admin status on any of the machines in their classrom and must call tech support for anything more than pressing the on/off button. grrrrrr!

The system is WinXP Pro / Novel tied into central servers. All of the "local" files are now stored on the central server which has already gone down in flames twice since the beginning of the year. To solve this problem, they gave all of the teachers a 1 GB flash drive to backup files daily.

Windows seems to corrupt its own files system causing sluggish behavior and errors as you describe. Our rocket science techies just come in and reinstall the operating system to solve this kind of problem.

I sure hope you don't have to resort to such a sledge hammer approach.

fos...

[autek]

Not by any means an expert in either MS or Linux, but........just about any problem that I have encountered on MS had to do with Mcaffee being installed. This was as early as win95 and as late as XP on my wife's new Dell. Dell no longer pre-loads Mcaffee on their new systems. Just my 02 pennies

Ed

[morgoth]

Update - had a fair number of hiccoughs during the day - the system has hung several times, luckily in each instance killing explorer.exe and waiting a minute or two and restarting it recovered things.

Tonight I booted into Windows Safe mode command prompt and did a chkdsk /F /V on both my d and e drives, both come up clean. No problems. Booted off Ubuntu Dapper Drake Live CD - tried to do a fsck on the e drive and it totally hung the system. No alternate console, nothing, keyboard and mouse and system were dead ducks. Using some logic, if it's happening to both Windows and Linux, that's not a good thing. That indicates a hardware issue to me. I'm going to try and last till the weekend and then I'm going to pull my cd-rw and 30gb drive out of the system and also the Promise controller card and plug the 300gb drive into the spare IDE slot on the motherboard and I'll see what happens. Oh, and I forgot to mention that initially I was getting the same error messages for a cdrom drive as I was for the [suspected] e drive. They've stopped now. This is why I suspect that it's the promise controller mucking up, since it has both a cdrom and hard disk drive attached to it. Eliminating it will be interesting. Damn thing is only 18 months old and I will NOT be impressed if it fails in such a short time. If it's dead I'll pull the data off the 30gb drive, store the cd-rw in a nice box, and get a 300gb sata drive to play with :)

Thanks to all that replied.

Cheers,

Dave

edit: Online virus scan didn't find anything :) Spyware scan was pretty clean as well :)

[fos]

Today:::

I coach a chess club at my school. I use a proprietary database to keep track of students games and rating. I had just entered about two weeks of games into the database. I tried to backup the data onto the school provided flash chip. My XP computer crashed during the backup, total freeze. I finally got it running again. The entire database was gone. It is nowhere to be found on the central server that we must use.

I decided that I would take a laptop to school and do everything other than attendance on my real personal computer.

The IP administrator stinks!!! (Real description deleted.)

fos....

[morgoth]

I do see your pont FOS, but I honestly don't think that Windows XP is that bad. I've been spoiled by Linux for a good length of time previously, which is undoubtedly more stable than Windows in any form. I've knowingly traded some security and reliability for the ability to be able to actually use the PC to do what I need it to do. A smart user with a lot of common sense can usually lock down Windows XP to be rather secure. Reliability over a long period of time is something that Microsoft does really need to work on. My system runs a lot slower now with 2.5gb of RAM, than it did with 512mb of RAM when I first installed Windows back in February. Go figure. I could probably play with the prefetch files, etc, but I'm just lazy.

Dave

PS I'm in the process of buying a PowerMac G4 400mhz system running 10.3.9 ;) Going to be upgrading it to a 1ghz machine, running a gb of RAM, and also upgraded the standard optical drive to a superdrive, as well as increasing the hdd from 20gb to 130gb ;) Still gotta get a KVM switch for it all. And yes, I have a Linux box next to my desk, need to get another dvd rom drive for it and get a CPU fan for it. I'll probably get rid of the hdds in it and get a 80gb drive and partition it for Linux/BSD so I can keep up on *nix skills.

[fos]

WinXP Pro isn't that bad. At my school, it is combined with Novel and an inept technology department. The IT department solves their problems by increasing centralization. The teachers can not even modify their own desktop or install any software. The heavy handed policies have made the system even less reliable.

I have two computers running XP Pro at home. One in my room for grading with the school's commercial grading package and a laptop that my daughter must have for her engineering classwork. My XP box is pretty stable, though it is rarely used. My daughter's is a little more tempermental.

That leaves four linux machines that only have problems when I subject them to my ham fisted programming skills. :)

fos....

[mdevour]

Dear Dave,

I have never succeeded in doing it myself, but the people I've seen who do best with XP are those that have their backup/restore procedures streamlined enough that they can wipe and reinstall windows entirely a couple of times a year without significant pain.

Question: Do the couple of programs you must have to do your work have Mac versions? If so, I wonder how long it's going to be before you'll be able to run them on Linux or BSD?

Be well,

Mike D.

[morgoth]

FOS I agree.

Mike - yes, both Photoshop and Neat Image have Mac versions. Sadly, that means that I have to *pay* for them all again. Why Software companies just can't let you trade in your Windows version for a Mac version (straight swap of software etc) is beyond me. Instead, they insist on making you have to purchase the same software again! Apart from the Music and Movie industries, it's the only industry that I knows that can legally charge you multiple times for the same content without fear of government interference. The sooner the software industry is heavily legislated, the better imho.

As to wiping etc, it's a pain in the a$$. Windows isn't that unstable yet [thankfully], it just does several things that irk me, that Linux does *right* imho. DOS is ugly, doing a cd ../../"program files" [from your home directory] does not take you to that directory, but says that the directory doesn't exist!!! Annoying things like this...when explorer.exe crashes, it bloody well shifts all open windows in the taskbar around, back to front, bloody upside down etc. And half the friggen time it bloody well moves your desktop icons around (I'm a messy bastard, most of my screen is filled with documents of interest rofl). It's my desktop, I like it as is :P Yes, it's a mess, but it's an organised mess :P Outlook 2003 - when you open a email, the delete button in the toolbar within the opened email is not accessible for a few seconds whilst Outlook does whatever it bloody well does. When I created my new profile due to the domain change, I now can't bloody well create a new folder on my desktop when I have open dialog window open (or I'm browsing the file system). If I've sent a file as an email attachment, I can't delete that file until I close Outlook, even 5 hours later when it's long gone!!! Why does Outlook bloody well friggen hang onto it for? Why??? Same with items in folders. If I've got a bunch of images in a folder on my desktop, and send them as email attachments, I can't delete the parent folder (and of course the files). Microsoft's RAW thumbnail viewer [when installed] *ucks up your image file permissions, so you can't make comments or notes in the properties section! Only fix is to uninstall the bastard.

Lots of little niggling things that just really $hit me. IE7 RC3, whilst a huge improvement still does things wrong. Actually, that reminds me of another pet hate. If I have a current IE window open on the taskbar, and double click a desktop URL shortcut, instead of opening said shortcut in a new window, it bloody well opens it in the current minimised window!!! Ugh!!! Every so often, IE just resizes the Window. God knows why, but it's a bloody nuisance. chkdsk when it runs doesn't leave a log file. Sure, an entry in Event Viewer is nice, but it bloody well should leave a log file imho. Windows Firewall? Screwed. Don't ask me why or how. It says it's got permissions inherited from the domain controller policy group, and that the Firewall is always tuirned on. I can't make ANY adjustment to it at all, none, it's all greyed out. Only way I can turn the Firewall off is to stop the service (which is OK by me, since I don't want the damn thing). Not even command line options (yes, I use DOS quite regularly on my Windows XP box, must be missing the Linux CLI) do nothing, when they bloody well should. None of the other XP boxes here have issues. Just mine. Warren does not have any global policies for the domain for having the Firewall on. I suspect that it's screwing with my Canon EOS Utility software as it won't auto open now when I plug the FireWire cable in for the camera (and it's been set to). Canon reckon it's the Firewall, I have it turned off (supposedly), and it still doesn't work. This is why I believe that software should be legislated. I paid for that Canon software, they should be bloody well *made* to fix it. Instead they blame Microsoft, Microsoft blames Canon and I get screwed over. Sure, I can manually start it, after the Camera does some sort of communication with XP for a minute or so, but, it's a pain in the a$$. Many of the guys on my photography forum say 'just use a card reader'. I shouldn't have to. It's designed to work directly from the camera, and it should. In my eyes, if it doesn't, it's false and misleading advertising.

It's just little things that irk me to no end. People don't care about quality in a product these days, they just want to make a buck. And the sad thing is, that most people in society are stupid and lazy enough to just allow this.

Dave

[mdevour]

You might try to sell your license to both pieces of software to somebody who wants/needs them. That'd at least get some of your money back and help defray the cost of the Mac versions.

It's not a pretty situation. <sigh>

On the bright side, you might be able to get the Mac versions running under Linux, though!

Mike D.

[morgoth]

Photoshop CS2 isn't supported under CrossOver office at all. Latest version of Photoshop that is supported is version 7. CS & CS2 aren't - it seems that whatever support/help Adobe provided the open source community so that Adobe 6 & 7 could get up and running under WINE etc wasn't forthcoming for CS/CS2. Pity. On the bright side, I do suspect that Adobe will release a Linux version of Photoshop in the near to mid future. Neat Image says on their website that it runs under WINE on Linux. I know from my testing of an older version of Neat Image with both WINE and Cedega that it would install Neat Image OK, and run it, but a lot of functionality was missing or wouldn't work properly. Maybe newer versions are better.

Dave

[mdevour]

Dave,

My reasoning is that since Apple has migrated the Mac to a BSD-based OS, it's just a matter of time before the open source community is ready to run most Mac apps under Linux, with a lot less hassle than windows apps.

Rather than using wine or cedega to run the windows version, we should almost be able to run the Mac versions natively -- I hope. So I would look into the current efforts to run Mac apps under Linux and see if the programs you need are working that way...

Unless of course you've already looked into it and didn't find anything! <grin>

Mike D.

Edit:

Never mind. A little digging suggests that this is still in the talking stage and may be more difficult than it would seem to be at first glance. A representative discussion is this blog and comments (http://linuxrevolution.blogspot.com/2006/02/mac-apps-on-linux.html).

<sigh>

Mike

[morgoth]

I know Transgaming has released a new piece of software for Intel Macs, similar to Cedega.

System is behaving a bit better after running the chkdsk the other night, but it's still hanging from time to time, so really do need to investigate it as a hardware issue. Will keep you posted on my findings ;)

Dave

[viator]

ugh look for in eventviewer for an event id of 1005 if ya see it your hd is about to crap the bed!. Damn it..... lol
As for macs man osx is slow when you have alot of crap running in dash i mean dog slow and you know what i feel that as a mac user owner that linux is a better product it really is it just feels right. Osx isnt as intuitive or organic as they say. Even my wife likes ubuntu better than osx and after seeing aiglx in action the osx efffects just arent that impressive for somthing that you pay for really. My next pc will be purchased from system76 not apple.

xp can be halfway decent if you strip alot of it out
and stop 75% of the useless services running by default using services.msc
and lock it down and remove some other crap using gpedit.msc and use a different firewall and use spyware and virus software use a different browser
maybe opera or firefox and dont use outlook man that thing is a security nightmare and in a large network it gets annoying fixing it every two days on every other pc. if theres a native port of kde4 for it it may even look/function better still. And dont get me going on that wga bs which we had a problem with on a legitimate copy preinstalled by compaq! Ofcoure that was on my wifes newest lappy and whatd she have to say to that ? "Install ubuntu im sick of this shit" lol

As for photoshop etc i personally dont need any of that "fancy" photoshop stuff krita works fine for me you just have to learn the ui and you can accomplish alot. Photoshop is the ubuntu of graphics apps theres tons of howtos tutorials tips tricks etc so you can easily search for them on the web and follow lots of dumbed down instructions to get things done thats why most ppl use it and once they are used to it refuse to use anything else because its "too hard" to learn a new ui. What ever happened to taking good pictures? everyone doctors the hell out of them nowdays to make up for skills they lack using the camera. This in noway is refering to any of you but to most people in general.