HenriK wrote:
Last month, I experienced a PC malfunction on my main PC that I have
never encountered before. Although I have been around long enough to
have owned PCs from the original IBM PC onwards, I have never really
understood the Windows OS very well. Today's NT-based Windows OS leaves
me utterly confused. I have no idea as to whether my problem is a
Windows problem, a SeaMonkey e-mail problem, a hardware problem, or some
combination of all three. Accordingly, I need some advice, either
on-list or off list and at no more than a moderately complex level, to
assist me in sorting out what happened and how to restore my main PC to
proper operating condition.
The PC at issue is a 32 bit Dell Precision 650 with dual 3.2 gHz CPUs
running XP-Pro SP3, fully updated as of 11-30-2013. My browser/e-mail
client is SeaMonkey, v.2.21.
Because of advice given to me early in my PC history, I have long had
the habit of dividing my hard drives into fairly small partitions to
facilitate easier backup (i.e., I have the SeaMonkey executables and
e-mail files in a partition shared with nothing else). Another
partition is devoted only to Microsoft Office executables and files and
my C:\ partition only contains the OS and its files plus those
application files that must reside in the same partition as the OS).
The first hint that something was going wrong came as I logged out of
the SeaMonkey e-mail client and an error message flashed for an instant
saying something about '... delayed write ...' (details of the error
message were not caught) and the PC rebooted. As the PC rebooted, the
OS indicated that two partitions (the partition containing the SeaMonkey
files and the partition containing the Microsoft Office files) needed to
be evaluated 'for consistency', whatever that means. When I tried to
re-initiate the SeaMonkey e-mail client, it didn't work, referring me to
the SeaMonkey wizard asking that I establish an e-mail account. As
there had been four e-mail accounts just a few minutes prior to whatever
went wrong, I used Windows Explorer to look at what files were actually
still in my SeaMonkey partition. It seemed that everything that should
have been in the partition, so far as I could remember, was still there
(including my substantial archive of the actual e-mail messages). In
addition, I found a new file with a bunch of zeros in the name which I
think I have seen on other failure occasions called 'lost chains',
whatever that means. I quickly copied all of the e-mail message files
to a CD-R and turned the PC off.
In the past couple of days, I have begun trying to sort out what
happened. When I start the PC, the OS indicates that two partitions
(the partition containing the SeaMonkey files and the partition
containing the Microsoft Office files) need to be evaluated 'for
consistency' but doesn't write anything additional to the SeaMonkey
partition and has never added anything to the Microsoft Office
partition. Does this mean that the OS has found something wrong with
the file indexes in those two partitions? How do I fix this problem?
Everything else on the PC - including the Microsoft Office partition -
appears to operate properly. Alternatively, do I have to reformat the
two partitions at issue and reinstall all of the software in those two
partitions or what? Could this problem be an indication of an impending
hard drive failure? Is this really a Microsoft OS problem and should I
refer my dilemma to a Microsoft forum? Why are at least some of my
e-mail initiation [profile (?)] files now apparently missing? Could it
have been something that I can't imagine? Help!
Lost chains mean that something has messed up the directory mapping in
that partition. I seem to remember that I was able to recreate some
files by recovering the pieces and getting them into the right order
again. That is possible with text files, not so much with binary files.
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