Defrag Killed My Hard Drive!

While running a disk defrag the screensaver popped up and
froze the computer. (This happened at some point while I
was away from the computer asleep. I won't defrag without
watching again!) The only recourse was to restart the
computer. That failed to happen as Windows would not load
up. I decided to start over from scratch and did and
Fdisk and it kept stopping for a while at about 5% while
checking disk integrity. It would restart and about the 3
time would finish the complete %100. That done I tried to
Format the disk. It hung up stating something about
recovering allocation sector followed by a long number.
As of right now the computer is kaput until I can figure
out what went wrong and how to fix it. (May have ruined
the hard drive.) The knowledge base at least pointed out
a way to have screen savers disabled during defrag and
I've set that up on this my second computer.

Hi Randall,

I suspect the drive has failed. Defrag may have been
enough to push it over the edge. At this point I would
suggest identifying the make and model of the drive, then
go to the manufactures web site and download there
diagnostic software to test the drive. I am not sure how
helpful this will be considering the drive can not be partitioned
via Fdisk.

--
Regards,
Bert Kinney [MS-MVP DTS]
http://dts-l.org/
How to Configure Outlook Express for Internet News:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=171164

"Randall" wrote in message
...
While running a disk defrag the screensaver popped up and
froze the computer. (This happened at some point while I
was away from the computer asleep. I won't defrag without
watching again!) The only recourse was to restart the
computer. That failed to happen as Windows would not load
up. I decided to start over from scratch and did and
Fdisk and it kept stopping for a while at about 5% while
checking disk integrity. It would restart and about the 3
time would finish the complete %100. That done I tried to
Format the disk. It hung up stating something about
recovering allocation sector followed by a long number.
As of right now the computer is kaput until I can figure
out what went wrong and how to fix it. (May have ruined
the hard drive.) The knowledge base at least pointed out
a way to have screen savers disabled during defrag and
I've set that up on this my second computer.

The light switch failed. It would not work even after
disconnecting and reconnecting wires. So you burned the house
down. IOW that is what happened to disk drive.

There are any number of reasons why problem exists. This is
only one possible reason. Somehow during the rebooting, the
disk drive was in the middle of a write. Therefore the reboot
actually erased files from disk. No problem. Simple reboot
from diskette or use of the SYS program could have fixed it.
But instead, you decided to burn the house down- do an FDISK.

But the disk was setup by a disk manufacturer program - not
by the conventional method provided by Microsoft. Therefore
FDISK, et al does not understand and cannot remove what was on
disk.

Now FDISK cannot read / write to the disk AND makes hard
drive look as if it failed. A problem exists that requires a
copy of that disk manufacturer's software (and it must be the
correct versions number), or some third party solution is
required such as Partition Magic.

In the future, don't start fixing things until you have
first collected basic information. You did not know why the
disk was not working and just decided to perform brain surgery
to cure a headache. Provided is but one reason why you are
having additional problems and no solution for that problem.
Is it the reason for failure? Nobody can say from the
woefully incomplete facts provided.

In addition to the above possible solution, (no matter what
the problem is) get manufacturer's hardware diagnostics first
to establish and learn some basic facts. Facts necessary
before continuing to fix things. Fact are currently not
available. Any real answer to your question is purely
speculation due to insufficient information.

BTW, how do I know this could happen? Been there. Done
that. Learned as a result.

Randall wrote:

While running a disk defrag the screensaver popped up and
froze the computer. (This happened at some point while I
was away from the computer asleep. I won't defrag without
watching again!) The only recourse was to restart the
computer. That failed to happen as Windows would not load
up. I decided to start over from scratch and did and
Fdisk and it kept stopping for a while at about 5% while
checking disk integrity. It would restart and about the 3
time would finish the complete %100. That done I tried to
Format the disk. It hung up stating something about
recovering allocation sector followed by a long number.
As of right now the computer is kaput until I can figure
out what went wrong and how to fix it. (May have ruined
the hard drive.) The knowledge base at least pointed out
a way to have screen savers disabled during defrag and
I've set that up on this my second computer.