Windows defrag, frakked me?

[Mav]

Long story, I made a thread over at [H]ardOCP, I'm also asking around other places for any and all help;

 

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1178098

 

Any help or advice is appreciated and most gladly welcomed.

[Amnot Borg]

the people there have told you most of what I can tell you. do a "complete" hard drive test to check for disk damages.

 

just remember, your pc is a machine that is prone to failure. it is common to have some sort of error. $$$

I've been known to reinstall an OS every 3-6 months. not always, thank the universe. ;) usually my fault for changing something... LOL but, that's just software problems. hardware needs to be replaced less often but it does wear out.

 

backup your important drive data as often as you can. or in your case with 2 hard drives, keep your OS on the 11GB and your other things such as mp3s or games on the 80GB. separating them like that means you can reinstall without ever damaging your private collections since they are on separate physical partitions instead of logical partitions.

 

oh yeah, BACKUP.

and BACKUP.

then maybe, BACKUP.

[TetsuoShima]

I can give you some good advice for a next time:

 

Before doing any sort of defragmentation on your hard disk, first do a disk check, if it's been only a short while since your last one, a simple disk check will usually do, if it's been a long time you really need to do a complete disk check before defragging. It often happens that certain parts of the disk become unstable, they are then replaced automatically, depending on the severity, either the OS blacklists the sectors, or the disk itself blacklists them (hard disks keep spare sectors, just to replace 'broken' ones, so you wouldn't notice your hard drive getting smaller), the hard disk does this process in a transparent way, you won't notice it, the OS doesn't allways, that's why you need to do a diskcheck first. To find any area that may not be completely stable any longer, because it was not written to or read from in a long time.

 

Also periodically check your smart info of your hard disk, especially reallocated sector count, if you see that value change a lot in a short while (a short while being a matter of days), your hard disk is dying, backup as crazy if you notice this and don't do much else with the disk, don't write new data to it, it won't last much longer.

 

The only thing you can do now, is to do a complete reinstall and reformat of the affected disk, if you want to positively get rid of the errors for a while, whether or not they stay away depends on the physical condition of the disk. Zero-ing the entire surface a couple of times, usually helps get rid of persistant errors, unless they are just to bad to be 'repaired' by the disks on head (writing known info (in this case a logical 0) to 'defective sectors' has a chance of repairing them). Make sure you use NTFS as a file system, it wears the disk down more and is a little slower because of the extra operations NTFS does with the disk, but it's more stable in the long run (the filesystem).

[Mav]

Thanks for the advice. I have done as I said in the [H] thread, a HDTune scan and my drive comes up ok, it's listed as healthy and scanned clean. Right now, it's "working", the OS install that is. The only thing wrong is in those two screenshots, the driver error for both com1 and my processor. I can boot into Windows fine, it's a slower boot but it boots, once inside I can do things as normal.

 

I've used the 11GB HDD as a backup, it houses stuff such as application install files (anti virus, firefox, etc) to family photos.

 

I know a reformat and reinstall of the OS would be the option to go with but I'm really looking for another method to fix these two errors. If you look in the [H] thread you'll see I mentioned checking for drivers for my specific processor/chipset, none were found, yet it's listed as a 2004 driver via Device Manager. So if I could somehow reinstall that particular driver, maybe it would fix that error?

[TetsuoShima]

Normally, you simply need to click update driver to re-install the driver, if re-install driver doesn't work, try letting it search the net for drivers (usually means, look in the MS database for drivers) instead of only locally.

 

If that doesn't work, you have to remove it and on the next boot windows will discover 'new devices installed' and install the necessary drivers, however, if the drivers have indeed gone corrupt, it won't find them and the computer may possibly crash (normally it shouldn't but you never know with MS :D ), after which you may only be able to boot in the safe mode. BTW for these particular components, usually the windows drivers are used, there usually aren't any 'brand specific' drivers.

 

Another option is not to make a clean install of windows, but simple re-install windows on top of the old install.

[Megalith]

you could try a firmware update of the HD bios. If i'm honest tho when things start going slow with a HD it indicates it is on its last legs. I have such a HD i use to store files i don't need frequent access to and they don't need fast access (MP3's E-books and photos) i barely use it and the data on it is stable now but i wouldn't run an OS with it.

[kyran]

processors don't actually have drivers

there is an iso of hirens boot disk in my ftp

and a copy of diskkeeper9

the hiren disk has all the utilities you need to diagnose your system

harddisk regenerator takes about 8 hours so it's an overnight job it fixes magnetic probs on harddisks (bad sectors that aren't really bad)

diskkeeper can do a boottime defrag which includes a chkdsk/r

it fixes a multitude of probs, takes about an hour

slow processor could also be caused by a faulty power supply unit

ftp is    ftp://pc-repair.no-ip.org

good luck