System Blue Screens after Defrag error

Defraggler
1

I have been using defraggler on 4 different computers for the last 3 or 4 weeks with great success until last night.

Maybe Defraggler should force a disk check before defragmenting to help prevent problems like I am having. This is unfortunately the only drive I care about of all of my computers. The data should still be there but windows is fubarred.

I was using Defraggler Version 1.02.078 RC2 to defrag my main home system since I was comfortable with the previous versions on this computer and had used this version on a few other computers. On this system I had previously defragged all of the files with large fragment counts and beleive I may have defragged the whole drive...or at least let it get to 80 - 90 % before stopping it.

What I saw this time after kicking it off and letting it run all night was that defraggler was at 92% and popped up the windows error message "This program has encountered an error and needs to close" so I chose to send the error report and then closed it. I then rebooted and everything seemed OK. I then set my C: drive to check and fix errors during boot, rebooted the system and left.

When I came back the system seemed fine. I told Defraggler to check the drive and it failed during the end of phase 2 or beginning of phase 3 so I set my C: drive to be checked again at boot and rebooted.

This time I saw it complaining about minor errors in phase1, other errors in pahse2, and 8 to 10 errors in phase3 dealing with $0 and $30 files (whatever that means). The system then booted up fine.

I then repeated the Defraggler check which failed again so I used windows to check the drive without the "fix errors" flag set but it failed to finish the check. I then set my C drive to be checked at boot and rebooted again. It found a few more things to fix and booted fine. I then set it to check drive C again and rebooted.

The system then checked C again finding a few more errors and then it started to boot and blue-screened and started to boot and blue screened over and over until I just shut the system off.

All in all I'm sure I did at least 5 disk checks at boot time before the system finally stopped booting up properly and left me in blue-screen hell.

The system is now stuck in this blue-screen reboot hell. The blue screen only stays up a fracction of a second so I can't read any words. I planned on replacing ntdetect and NTLDR while booted from media to recovery console, but it was 2 AM and didn't want to attempt to fix it. With the Promise controllers I'll have to insert driver disks as well.

AMD Athlon XP 2600+

1 GB PC2100 DDR RAM

Epox 8KHA+ w/KT266 chipset

Seagate 320 GB Perpendicular SATAII drive (along with a 300 & 200)

Promise TX2300 SATAII (320GB & 300GB drives are on it)

Promise FasTrack SATA 150 TX2 (200GB drive on it)

Windows XP Pro SP3 with all updates

Sound Blaster LIVE X-Gamer

MSI GeForce2Ti 64MB AGP

3 DVDRW Drives

external USB devices

ZoneAlarm Free (latest)

AVG 8.0.x (latest)

Spybot S&D 5.2 w/ teatimer(latest)

2

UPDATE 6/23/2008

After booting from the WindowsXP Pro CD and using my promise driver I got it booted to the recovery console. From there I ran "chkdsk c: /p" several times. Each time it checked the disk it came back and told me it had encountered an unrecoverable error.

The system did however boot to windows after this checking from DOS. Instead of giving me the screen with multiple login names and icons thought it attempted to establish a vpn connection (no idea why but I do have cisco vpn software) so I cancelled that and it gave me a domain login screen. I logged in with my username and password and it logged me in to my good ole' desktop and data.

At this point I started using windows explorer to migrate all of my data to my external drives. I found 4 or 5 files that were un-copyable so I just deleted them. Luckily they were just temp files, program files, and a large video ISO that weren't that important. I assume they were the files that were corrupted and unrecoverable.

Once that was done I downloaded and ran the latest version of SeaTools from Seagate. The short test and long test both passed without any errors. I then told it to zero-fill the drive and went to bed.

It looks like the damage was to my filesystem and wasn't due to any type of hardware failure. I still think forcing the disk check before beginning the defrag is one safety-net we all need. Maybe you could have it as an option that is set by default but is available to un-check for users who want the no-frills approach. I myself like the "safe data" approach.

3

Recovery Console from a cd (if running from cd) should not fail on fixing a file system, other useful commands are fixboot and fixmbr, from those you can use chkdsk to fix the filesystem without error. (Had to use those thanks to SP 3 update screwing my filesystem). Its possible that during those 90 percents etc you were canceling while defraging system volume information which as you can guess holds the volume information of the drive. Don't know how that would cause a problem, but computers are funny and even a minor power off can screw them over.

4

For future reference, you can disable the bluescreen/reboot behaviour to allow you to see the bluescreen properly. Provided you can get to it okay, do the following:

1) Right-click 'My Computer' and choose 'Properties'.

2) Click the 'Advanced' tab.

3) Under the subsection entitled 'Startup and Recovery' click the 'Settings' button.

4) On the separate 'Startup and Recovery' dialog that pops up, untick 'Automatically restart' under the 'System Failure' section.

It's worth saying that, although Windows defrag tools actually use the built-in API to handle the file moving and for that reason are generally very safe, you should *always* check partitions for errors before defragging. Any file system errors present will only be magnified 'x'fold once you start shuffling files around and updating their MFT entries.

In a perfect world the procedure should always be....backup, check and then defrag.

All the best with getting it sorted out.