On Jun 7, 4:28*am, Adam <n...@xxxxxx> wrote:
Quote:
> Hi All,
>
> On Vista Home Premium, I've set Chkdsk to run but each time it hangs
> about three quarters of the way through step 5, at the same cluster
> each time. I've run the harddisk tests (SMART, surface scan etc) from
> the computer recovery console and it passes every test OK.
>
> If this a physical problem with the drive or a file system one? If
> it's the latter why can't Chkdsk fix it? It's a new computer should I
> go through the hassle of returning it to the manufacturer?
>
> Thanks a lot,
> Adam
>
> P.S. History: it's a brand new Lenovo laptop. When I first switched it
> on, it gave me that "Vista didn't shut down properly last time"
> screen, but apart from that everything seemed OK until I got most of
> the way through all the security updates, cleaning up all the bundled
> software etc and Windows Update blankly refused to install SP1. I
> tried a system restore and that told me there was a disk error and to
> run Chkdsk. Chkdsk refused to run (something about the drive being
> locked) and in the end I did a factory reset. This is OK in that now
> all the updates have installed and there are no more errors, but I
> wanted to double check the disk, so invoked Chkdsk and... see above.
Stage 5 is verifying freespace. You may have a lot of freespace and
chkdsk may appear to freeze yet still be working. Is the hard drive
light blinking, or does it stop? If chkdsk will continue to fix
problems, but sometimes if it finds too many, it needs to start over
and will loop. I've seen chkdsk run all day and all night in some
cases. If there doesn't appear to be any hard drive activity, then I
would be concerned -- although, it can pause for several minutes while
it maxes the cpu and memory with no apparent hard drive activity.
One could remove the drive and run chkdsk with the drive as a slave to
another, or one could download additional drive verification utilities
from the drive manufacturer; but, since it is under warranty I'd call
tech support and complain. Let them figure it out or ship you a new
drive or a new laptop.
I wouldn't fret about SP1 not installing. As you've probably learned,
there are lots of reasons that SP1 doesn't install; certain hardware,
drivers, OEM utilities or other software incompatibilities will
prevent SP1 from automatically downloading and installing. As those
problems are resolved, you will receive updates through Windows Update
and eventually SP1 too.
-solon fox