Need help with a ckhdsk problem on Win 2k

April 18, 2007 11:48 AM

Strange problem with chkdsk in windows 2000. My machines currently have latest Zone alarm (virus prot disabled), Diskeeper 2007, and Kaspersky AVP 6.0. I am noticing unusual behavior on both of them, but more so on one of them than the other.

I dont know if this is just a coincidence or the events are actually related. I recently installed Kaspersky Anti Virus 6.0 on my win 2k machines which have had ZA, and DK for sometime now.

On first machine here is what I see -

At some point I was trying to access "..Application Data\All Users\Kaspersky..\AVP6\" directory content. I noticed that trying to open any of the sub-folders takes FOREVER and the disk keeps spinning in the mean time. Eventually it does list the content which is not much. This happens with each of the sub folders.

I started to think that the disk may be corrupted. So I run chkdisk from within win2k and it detects some MFT and file handle related issues in the disk and says they need to be fixed during reboot. I did not see any message about circular depdencies though. So I schedule a chkdsk /F task during reboot.

So chkdsk runs during reboot, but it does not complain about anything and does not seem to fix anything. This is strange. Then I am back in Win2k and I notice the same issues again.

I thought I should try without the KAV process. But I could not shut down the AVP process manually (even from service control panel). I guess my only options is to uninstall it and see if it helps.

But I dont know if KAV at all has messed up its own data folders somehow. Or is it Diskeeper that messed things up. I am just surprised that it involves KAV folders, which i installed so recently.



Some other observations on the second machine.

I have another machine with the same setup including KAV and there I can navigate its data folders fine. However I noticed opening locally stored DVD files on a local disk on that machine with Power DVD takes very long. Did not happen before, but that was a while ago. I did not try this experiment on the first machine yet and I dont know if these are connected to KAV at all.

Also strangely enough when I run media player classic app on this second machine and I click on the File menu it does not pop up and it goes into some kind of hang state for a while. It eventually continues running, but no menu showed up. Did not see this with other apps. But I have not seen this problem on first machine either.


I cannot for sure say if all these behaviors on the second machine started after KAV install. I am now noticing them because after i had problem with the first machine, I was trying to compare the behaviors of these two machines with almost similar setup


So if any of you guys can tell me why chkdsk is not finding the problems during a reboot, and yet it finds them during normal operation, and what could be the reason for LOOONG folder open delay on the first machine I would appreciate it very much.

thanks

posted by flyby22 to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Not sure. If chkdsk is giving problems or inconsistant results I'd go a level lower and run the manufacturer's utilities like Seagate's Seatools, which may be a free download nowdays and might even work on non-seagate drives. WD has similiar tools. I'd prob also assume that's a bad disk at this point to be on the safe side.
posted by damn dirty ape at 1:31 PM on April 18, 2007

The most common cause of disk access that takes a hell of a long time but otherwise works, or otherwise causes occasional, non-repeatable problems, is a dying hard disk.

You might be able to see symptoms of this in the drive's internal SMART log. Run DiskCheckup (free for home use), and if you see lots of reallocated sectors, or especially lots of sectors pending reallocation, go buy a new drive.
posted by flabdablet at 5:08 PM on April 18, 2007

Not sure about any of your big problems, but I just had your Media Player Classic problem and stumbled across this thread while Googling for a fix. I fixed it by going into the MPC options (view->options) and checking "hide CD-ROMs menu."
posted by Partial Law at 3:46 PM on May 4, 2007