Pooched
Damn if my laptop isn’t pooched. I had got the most important stuff off the drive (I hope), and asked Norton Disk Doctor to have another look. It, again, indicated that it couldn’t work on the drive because something else had it in use, and that I should schedule a repair and reboot the computer.
And that, my friends, was that. The computer will start to load Windows — the splash screen comes up for about two seconds, and then the machine resets, and comes up to the boot menu. You know, the one that asks if you want safe mode, or to boot into the last known good state, or to boot normally. That just cycles through again and again, no matter what option you choose.
Pooched.
I’m trying one last-ditch attempt to revive the damned thing through the “recovery console” on the WinXP installer disk, running a chkdsk /r. It’s been at that for an hour plus, and it’s only 63% through. I’m avoiding the chkdsk /mbr like the plague, as that can get real messy.
I’m about set to turn the thing into an expensive frisbee.
I wanna MAC!
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chkdsk /mbr just writes a new master boot record, and shouldn’t take more than a few seconds. However, it’s not likely to fix your problem - an MBR rewrite will usually only help when your drive isn’t recognized as bootable. Since you’re getting to the splash screen, you’re already past the MBR and VBR.
Disk Doctor/chkdsk will always report the drive with a swap file as being in use or locked by a system process. Because it is - the kernel VM routines. It’s similar to how you can’t write changes to the root filesystem in UNIX without remounting after.
And Windows or MacOS, and especially with laptops, failures can occur at any time. ‘S why backups are important.
This type of behavior is usually due to a bad driver, corrupted system library, or widespread filesystem corruption. The last may very well be hardware related.
Happily, I guess, I had just completed moving the most important files off the machine to another drive. So, I don’t think there’s any significant data loss. It’s just a PITA on the morning of day one of a vacation.
Fortunately, we have a second laptop. I left mine crunching away trying to make some sense of the drive. Maybe it will have some information for me by Monday when I return.
BTW, I know that hardware is hardware, and will fail, no matter the platform. I just had far fewer problems with the Macs that I’ve owned (except the one that I was using Compaq SCSI2 external storage units with — the drives kept failing). They just seem to work.
[...] The laptop (remember the laptop?) seems to have been able to get over at least some of its problems. It still has problems with fonts, and probably some other issues that I haven’t found yet — at this point, I’m guessing that it does need a new hard drive. I’m trying now to ascertain whether or not it’s under warranty. If not, it’s looking like about $130 in parts for a new, 120GB drive, and a few of my hours to put it in and re-setup the machine. Could be better, could be worse. [...]