Akkh!! What does this error mean??

[teddyFBI]

Just this past weekend, two very disturbing things have happened on my brand new (6 months old) Dell 9300.

1) This error has popped up several times:


2) I've gotten a blue screen of death that told me I needed to restart my computer. I forget the exact language on the blue screen, but it was ominous sounding: something like "hard drive memory failure. Data has been lost." or something like that.

Anyway, I immediately backed up all important documents, but it appears that these errors continue to pop up...they seem of the serious variety...i.e. some deep-rooted hardward problems that I'm not sure a simple reinstall of Windows XP Recovery could fix...

Any ideas?

[Link774]

Call dell, tell them the errors. They'll have you do some diagnostics and perhaps find that your HD or memory is failing.

[TheTROLL]

Probably a hard drive on its way out. Reinstalling Windows won't do any good if it is. You can investigate by running a full disk scan, but if it's under warranty I'd probably just copy my stuff off and send it back.

[teddyFBI]

OK, both replies seem to suggest that the HD could be faulty.
What's the "full disk scan" you recommend running, and how do I do it? What will it tell me if indeed the HD is acting up?

[TheTROLL]

From a command prompt type

chkdsk /f

and you'll get a message saying you can't run it because the drive is in use, but can then have the scan run when the PC next reboots. And then reboot it yourself when you're ready for it to run (from memory, it may take something around an hour for a big disk)

[teddyFBI]

Cool, and then what kind of results does that scan give? Will it straight up tell me if something is wrong w/ my HD?

[Meech]

Try purging your temporary internet files. I can't recall these causing a BSOD but when it gets full sometimes funky things happen.

From IE, Tools/Internet Options. Under Temporary Internet files, click Delete Files.

[Rick Nebiolo]

[ QUOTE ]
Cool, and then what kind of results does that scan give? Will it straight up tell me if something is wrong w/ my HD?

[/ QUOTE ]

It might. Better would be to download a vendor utility such as Maxtor's PowerMax.

If you have serious data (e.g. Pokertracker databases, photos) to protect you might want to look at this post I wrote last night which includes patching a hard drive using PowerMax and a scheme to protect your programs and data from HD failure. Despite having multiple hardware failures (including HD failure boot problems), I haven't lost any data and could easily restore every bit of my WinXP and Program partition if I needed to.

~ Rick

[teddyFBI]

Alright so I ran the chkdsk utility from the command prompt. Took around 20 minutes...found about a dozen corrupt or unreadable things and apparently fixed and/or removed them...so what did I find out?

Is it normal for that process to find a few corrupt/unreadable things?

Is all I can do now essentially wait around to see if that error pops up again?