Okay, where to start.... Client running Win2k, has an 80gb hard drive, was running out of space, it's got multiple partitions c-h, c is a primary partition, the rest were extended
partitions. The drive was actually only partitioned to use 40 of the 80gb for some reason <shrug>.. So used ghost 2003 to clone the 80 to 160gb unit, many chose the new partition sizes in ghost to match what the client needs space. After cloning system, cleaned out spyware, did all windows and other missing application updates etc. Thought it was all good, somewhere along the way made some changes to the h: drive (downloads, pictures and videos), rebooted, chkdsk ran and found errors on c: drive and repaired them, it them got to H: drive and found a gazillion errors. Rebooted with BartPE, fixed all filesystem errors. Somewhere along the way, same thing happened again.... I then recloned from the original drive, let ghost autoresize the partitions, cleanup and updates again. Machine seems to be working fine, added and removed some files from H:, all good. Machine goes back to client. He'd ordered some external usb hdd cases to replace his tape backup system. The original 80gb was put into one and a new 160gb was put into a second enclosure. While I was at the site, he pointed out that most of the video files on H: wouldn't play in either Nero Media Player or Windows Media Player. WMP would give an error of some kind and restart. This happened whether you double clicked on the file or used file/open. Thinking it might be codec problem, I uninstalled WMP, reinstalled it and the codec pack from the WMP site at MS. Still no joy. Did some browsing through the machine and found it would play wmv files on other drives files, just not the h: drive. Ditto for mpeg files. So at this point I was sure the files on H: drive were corrupted, hooked up the old drive in the external usb case, copied and replaced all the files on the H: drive from the original. When I left there was life 1.5 hours to go still. Got back to the office, and got a call a couple hours later saying that the copy completed, he'd rebooted and gotten an error about \winnt\system32\ntoskrnl.exe missing and system wouldn't boot. Had him boot with bartpe disk and run chkdsk /f on both the c: and h: drives, several errors found on c: and repaired, a gazillion file system errors found on h: again as originally. So... I made another visit. I do a repair using the ERD with a win2k SP4 cd, telling it to overwrite/repair all files it has a problem with. Now getting errors about tdmti.sys. Using bartpe, I manually replaced broken files then got errors about missing or unwritable registry hives, replaced the hive files with backups I'd made on the 27th of July when he came to pickup system, next got bsod's, I later found out to be related to corrupt PC Cillin 2006 files. Replaced those from the original drive, now I get into windows, get some errors about some other PC Cillin files, replace those, run update on PC Cillin, it installs new version and those errors go away. Do the Microsoft Update dance, get 40 or so updates. Can tell IE is not working right (crashes), so after another round of updates it seems okay, Re-install Shavlik HF Netchk Protect, it deploys a bunch of updates. IE still acting funny. Do some more updates and reinstall a few apps (Firefox etc), all seems to be good. I then use Acronis Disk Director to copy the H: partition from the original 80gb drive back to new 160gb drive without resizing, then run the parition check in Acronis on both the c: and h: drives, both pass without issue. Reboot, data is still corrupted, can open jpeg's on the drive with MGI PhotoStudio III, but it gives an error about each image opened being in use by another program. Earlier I was suspecting some kind of partition corruption. I boot with Knoppix and run gpart, it only finds 3 partions, all primary ones and gives no listing of the logical partitions. Next I load up boot from partition magic 8 rescue disks. With the original 80gb drive in usb enclosure attached to the system and turned on, PM barfs about something about there being more cylinders than the bios can handle. -- Harondel J. Sibble Sibble Computer Consulting Creating solutions for the small business and home computer user. [EMAIL PROTECTED] (use pgp keyid 0x3AD5C11D) http://www.pdscc.com (604) 739-3709 (voice/fax) (604) 686-2253 (pager) -- ---------------------------------------- The WIN-HOME mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html
