Windows 2000 Server Issue

Ginger

Mornin

I have a Windows 2000 Advance Server box. Problem is this

Machine has 1.5 GB Ram and 240 Gigs HDD (Comprised of 2 120GB IDE ATA133 HDD each with 2 Partitions)

When i use the Windows Defrag tool i can only connect to 3 of the 4 partitions. One gives memory error (XXXXXXX cannot be read)

The partition that gives this error is the 1st partition on the slave drive.

Unfortunately the system also has 2 optical drives, so both hard disks are on the same IDE cable to the motherboard.

I would like to try and sortout this problem in case it leads to a HD crash or something like such. The partition has only 20 or so gigs out of 60 taken up.

In case this matters

CPU is a Athlon XP 2400 (266 FSB)
Mobo is a MSI KT600 Delta FISR-2

Any help appreciated

Capt'n Midnight

IIRC the defrag utility / NTFS can only handle up to certain cluster sizes or was that for compression??

Try contig on http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/contig.shtml
contig *.* -v -a
Verbose Analysis - ie. don't defrag yet just to see if it gives an error message

ColmOT [MSFT]

I'd recommend that you run
chkdsk /f
on the offending HD before you do anything. Defrag depends on the disk integrity being 100%.

Try that and let us know how it goes.

Ginger

Cheers folks

Will do that and see what i can come up with.

Ginger

Used chkdsk e: /f and that worked.

It reported that it found that some free space had been marked as allocated in the MFT.

Now if i could only get Rise of Nations to stop quitting during games.

ColmOT [MSFT]

I'd recommend that you chkdsk once every 2 or 3 weeks (via scheduled tasks), and definately defrag at least once every 2-3 weeks as well.

This means that if anything does go wrong, you're pretty confident that the disk is OK, so the problem is probably somewhere else.