hi there peeps, its been a while since i last posted so please excuse any mistakes.

recently (last 2 weeks) i have had a re-occuring error with my PC
I am running win xp pro and the PC wil be turned on, the first time I was out of the room watching a film and came back to the pc and I had a little yello warning in the task bar (by the clock) and it said a certain file was missing or corrupted and i should run disk checker eg dskchk

i tried to run this but it said it could not be found as it was missing or corrupted! so i went to load up some antivirus and ant spam anti ad-ware programs and all the shortcuts were messed up and could not link to the programs as they were also missing or corrupted! basically i could not do anyhting as all the folders were slowly becoming corrupted and could not be opened. so i guess you can guess what happened - i had to reboot. and of course windows did not load because some of the windows files were missing or corrupted.

i tried linking the HD to my laptop through an ide to usb cable, the HD was detected as being in RAW format - eg no file system. so i defrag and disk checked it, which then allowed me to see all the files and back some of them up. then i tried to boot again but still no luck. so i contemplated trying to copy system files from laptop to pc (eg open windows folder and literally copy the files from one HD to another) but i decided this would not work as laptop uses win xp home (not pro) and its probably not possible to bodge problems like this by just copying a few files. right?

anyway i reformatted reinstaled etc. oh, when the problem occured the pc was running a div x film and i had a couple of downloads going - nothing strenuous (i have 1.5 gb ram and 1.67 ghz processor)

now, the other day i had the same problem occur, but this time i was at the pc. i had a warning saying firefox (my browser) had missing or corrupted files and must be shut down. a shiver went down my spine so i immediately started backing up files using external HD and cd writer (i later found that a lot of the files i backed up were unreadable - eg corrupted). as time went by and i was furiously backing up more files said they were corrupted. specifically i could not open windows/system folder. or windows/system32/drivers

i could not defrag or check for errors (but i did run SFC ok, and AVG antivirus), so i set it to check for errors at next boot - hoping that it would do the error check before booting windows. then find the system file errors, then fix them, then boot ok, but this didnt happen. it just hung (stopped ) after loading IRQ numbers (u no the black screen after loading drivers, processor, ram etc).
so again i connected to hd and it said HD was raw, so did disk check, then was able to see all files again, so backed more up. and restarted pc. but i guess some windows files get damaged beyond repair, and this was to no avail - yet again could not boot, so reformat.

im trying to get to the bottome of this so it doesnt happen again, but cant think where to start - any help much appreciated.

thanks in advance

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HOOD

It sounds a lot like bad sectors to me. Hardware problems on the hard drive bad sectors will cause files to become corrupted. You may want to check the web site of the hard drive manufacture and see what they suggest and see if they have any tools for check the drive of damage. But you can almost limit it down to bad hardware.

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If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

i also expected "bad sectors" or something physically wrong with my HD, but its only about a year old and its a nice western digital 250GB...... if western digitals own driver test software doesnt detect anyhting (i downloaded their utility from website) and neither does defrag or disk check (dskchk at boot, blue screen, takes ages, etc etc) then what could the problem be?

the SAME problem, ,, eg firefox corrupted etc, then system corrupted etc happened again 2 days ago. so yet again i was left with corrupt file system and had to wipe hard drive and start over. im beginning to think there is sumthing up with windows......... (when i lose my data i "clone" my OS and data back to HD to save time) , could it be a problem in the clone that i have made?

the clone is from this computer in the first place - its a backup i made a few months ago when everythin was working perfectly :-)

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HOOD

It sounds almost like a virus but since your formatting the hard drive that I think would rule that out unless you have a virus piggybacking on something you download and install after the format. In any case there could be something wrong with the clone I would suggest that you try a complete fresh install no clones just the windows disk itself. At this point I would rule out bad sector. First if it were bad sector after you reinstall, Windows would have mark the sector and wouldn't have installed anything on them, if it did that and still went bad in that short of a time frame after the reinstall that would mean that those sector are going bad really fast. I would think that both windows and the WD tools would have pick up something.

If a fresh install doesn't work you may want to call WD and talk with them it may be something else wrong with the drive that the tools don't scan for.

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If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

hmm i guess your right
but the problem is at the moment i do not ahev time to fresh instal and then set up windows th way i like it and re instal and download all progs and settings
are there no other utilities that could test my drive for integrity or scan pc for physical errors? i have up to date AVG scanner and regulary use panda online scanner, bit defender online scanner and norton online scanner. i also use ad aware and spybot.................

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HOOD

This clone you have does it just have windows on it or is it like the Norton Ghost program ie. once you install it your computer is back to normal and no other install are needed?

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If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

I had a semaler problem once computer would stop booting missing files and the like. All windows test checked ok but when I ran Partition magic it reported bad partition struction and fixed. I did not have any problems after.

hey there
heres an update on current situation:

the clone i use is created using norton ghost. i inbstal windows xp pro about a year ago and made a clone to another IDE HD. i used the clone to restore my data a couple of times , quite a while back. then in the last 2/3 weeks i have had to clone back to it 3 times because of the aforementioned corruption of the HD

since then i used western digital utility to check it, and its ok, also i have done scan disk and defrag numerous times. i have used about 4 or 5 online virus scanners
and have 4 security programs to remove adware etc

just lately i decided to use partition magic to create a partition ( the 250 gb hd used to be all one partition). but partition magic broke the boot secotr or did sumthing bad - unable_to_mount_drive or some such error.

i have not looked into this yet
anyway i went and formated HD using dos, so i have a 30gb primary HD and 200 gb secodn drive (as D:\)
then i cloned the windows xp instalation using norton back to th 30 gb HD......
note, at this point i also tried to use norton to create a disk image and save it on the d drive incase c drive became corrupted again, but norton can not do this as is does not recognise d as a valid drive because its 200gb and norton only supports 128gb hds or smaller!

anyway i have used windows xp backup utility and ASR to create backuos on the D: drive

one quick note - does any one know if my d drive will become corrupted if i have the same probelm reocur as i had before? eg the file system on c because corrupted/ruined............ might this "spred" to d, or is d: quite a secure space to backup work?

anyway im stil trying to figure out why my c drive because corrupted approximately once a week for the last 3 weeks, i have now sptn about a week making numerous backups and emergency repair stuff, but stil have no clear solution to prevent it happeneing again, i am hoping the re-cloning and partitioning might help? also i ran SFC and it asked for the cd, so i guess it found erors and fixed them>?? anyone know?
just a quick Q - how often do you guys recomend i run SFC and other security progs? at moment i do them on a weekely basis, and backup as often as possible, once a week, often more.

im expecting HD to be corrupted again over th next few days and still dont know why, but hoping backing up to d drive will speed up my recovery when i repir it.

just a few notices - my CPU often runs at 100% when i convert huge (13GB) video files, also i have 1.5 GB ram (3x 512 crucial sticks). average temp for general system is about 35 degrees, and average cpu temp is normally just under 70 degrees. does any of this sound alarming to you guys, and if so, is there any (easy) solution?

i think i have babbled for long enough

all comments greatfully recieved
cheers

PS whats the chance that this thread will be found (searchable) on google? eg how often/popular is it?

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HOOD

i just read something that said MFT could be damaged and cause system to become corrupted...........? is this a possibility? how do i restore my MFT and how do i back it up?

also recently (in the last three weeks) i have copied lots of files from external HD (up to about 20 to 30 GB) to the PC, eg this is where i backup my work, so after re-cloning pc i retrieve my data, i read somewher that copying large amounts of data could have an adverse affect? is it really possible? if so surely i could just do disk check and sfc etc after copying them all to make sure the system is ok, and repair it if not????

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HOOD

more "progress" on my stream of errors. i used pc today after doing a fresh clone. i made a backup using win xp utility, it was 11gb, i stored it on d drive. then i coppied two large files (700mb each) over th lan onto my d drive. so i decided to defrag, it was 45% fragmented - only after 3 files!?!?!?!? and part way through th defrag th pc crashed, BSoD msg - kernel_stack_inpage_error
so i restart pc and neither OS will load (i have win xp instaled twice on pc), i used win xp recovery and did a chkdsik on both drives, both find errors, and both are "fixed" anyhow the problem persisits and i am now fed up with my pc breaking so i re-clone again. the d drive is corrupted but i can still c the files - so not as bad as normal (normally when it crashes the whole hd is corrupted) this time only part of d drive. so now i got windows on it frash, and am doing chkdsk as i type., its finding a lot of errors and correcting them (been going for over an hour now!)

so im led to believe either my version of windows is messed up and i should reinstal from scratch,,,,,,,,,
OR
my HD is messed up (because i coppied some big files this caused it to become corrupted). is there any sort of "rule" of thumb when using big files? i have never had problems before?

i have downloaded a set of cpu, memory and hd test exes to use,,,,,,,,,,,, am so confused to what is causing this now. i think a nw hd might fix it, but this one is only a yr old and cost a lot - its 250 GB!

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HOOD