Windows Borked

[4g3nt_Smith]

So, I've got my computer at a friend's house for a couple of weeks, and everything works fine. I decided yesterday to bring it home. Got it here, plugged everything back in, and try to boot. Gets to the point where the login should appear, then restarts. I try to boot into safe mode, and get the error that my ntoskrnl.exe is missing and or corrupt. A Windows XP disc, recovery disc, and one hour later, I discovered I had to do a chkdsk /r and got everythign back into a running state. Now though, the computer reboot randomly, runs BF2 sluggish, and every time I click a folder to open it, up comes the "Open with..." prompt, as though the folder filetype were no longer associated with explorer. Could this be from Windows going south, or is it a dying hard drive?

[Kills On Site]

Definatly a strange problem, I would lean towards hard drive issue, I would run something like the equivalant to PowerMax, PowerMax is for Maxtor drives, something to run an extensive test on the drive. I know people say I say this too much, but I would run a zero fill on the drive. If it is a small problem then the zero fill will most likely fix it, if the drive is dying then it will most likely die during the zero fill and thus not fuck you over in Windows. Hope it gets fixed or replaced before screwing your files over

[Tormentius]

I'm curious KoS, do you have any technical reasoning behind your obsession with zero filling drives?

[Kills On Site]

Technical reasoning? Not really. Just experience. Had a laptop HDD once, got really fucked up by my sister somehow, I reformatted many many times and it was still completely unstable, I finally zero filled it and the HDD is still running with no crashes. I also have an external HDD that was given to me because it fucked up half an hour after ever format, so I unscrewed the incasing and put the drive internally, ran a zero fill and it is back as a external HDD and has not crashed since I zero filled it.

[4g3nt_Smith]

I fail to see how, a zero fill is just filling the entire drive with 0's, which would technically not touch the MBR, partition table, or any of the other stuff that causes drive issues most of the time. Placebo Effect++

[Tormentius]

Technical reasoning? Not really. Just experience. Had a laptop HDD once, got really fucked up by my sister somehow, I reformatted many many times and it was still completely unstable, I finally zero filled it and the HDD is still running with no crashes. I also have an external HDD that was given to me because it fucked up half an hour after ever format, so I unscrewed the incasing and put the drive internally, ran a zero fill and it is back as a external HDD and has not crashed since I zero filled it.

So you really don't know what a zero fill does, do you? It fills the drive with zeroes but also runs a surface scan, looking for bad sectors and marking them as bad so they aren't used. This prevents instability because data won't be written to unusable sectors. The funny thing is that "chkdsk /r" does the same thing in Windows without the need for a reinstall. Choosing to do a full format while installing Windows runs a surface scan as well (thats why it takes longer than a quick format).

Zero fills are almost never needed and are, as Smith said, a placebo effect.

[4g3nt_Smith]

So, I backed up what little I needed to (thank god its purely for gaming, so no files to copy) and went to reinstall, deleted partition, made new one, did an NTFS format (non-quick) then realize I should've run the PowerMax tool first probably, but not that I'm in for the long haul, I guess I could run it after and attain the same results?

[4g3nt_Smith]

And I'm taking the wonderful loud (I can hear it from a foot away with the telly and Air Conditioning on) clicking sound I hear while setup copies over drivers.cab means my drive is on its last limb.

EDIT: Now I've hit ANOTHER roadblock; I also have another drive in the computer, which has a single NTFS partition, which I used to store everything on. Now, I can go to My Computer, and it shows up, but I can't open it. I looked at the properties, and it said the format was RAW, but when I go into the Disk Management within Windows, it shows the Partition is there, and has it label, and correct size attributes (used, total).

[Kills On Site]

I did not know that chkdsk /r did the same thing as far as the surface issue, but since they both do it then a zero fill isn't a placebo, just overkill. However Smith, you or Seagate is wrong

Zero Fill Drive (Quick) will write over the beginning of the drive which includes the critical partition information, eliminating all partitions and information on the drive including the Master boot record. This is useful if you have a drive that has a corrupted partition or that you wish to erase to reinstalll a fresh operating system and new data.

Zero Fill Drive (Full) will write over the entire data area of the drive. This is useful if a drive has bad sectors that cannot be fixed by the operating system. This will also erase all the data on the drive, but it will take several hours.

source from Seagate
so it appears that zero filling does overwrite the MBR and partition information.

[4g3nt_Smith]

Oi, drive is failing according to the Maxtor utility, so I got a diagnostic code form it, and I'm now checking the other drive in the rig to be on the safe side, before I go ahead and crack the PC open and get the serial numbers in the hope I can RMA it for little to no cost to me.

UPDATE: RMA'ed fine, still in warranty, and I did the advance RMA, so I hope to get the drive soon. For now, I've got an Ubuntu X86-64 Ubuntu Live CD in the box, and it gets to be my primary machine for about a week, until I get my Mac Mini, or the HD comes and I can install an OS. Whichever comes first.