psiu wrote:... I smell a reinstall in your future ...
Sniff, sniff ... hmm .... really ?
I want to change from Vista x86 to Vista x64 anyway.
DaveLessnau wrote:Does CHKDSK bring up anything?
Oh boy, running chkdsk is easy, but I didn't know how difficult it was to find the log afterwards:
How to run chkdsk in Vista
Click Start / Computer / right click the C drive and select properties / tools tab / Error-checking: check now / because the c: drive was in use, chdsk was scheduled to run after reset.
... after a restart the screen just got black and the HDD becomes very busy, for a long time. No graphical feedback - nothing.
Then Windows restarted. Again: nothing. No report, no result - nothing.
Google helped me finding that after running chkdsk a log has been stored, and here is where to find it:
Control Panel / System & Maintenance / Administrative Tools / Event Viewer / Left Panel: expand Windows Logs / click Application / Middle Column: find Wininit and highlight ... window underneath: the Details tab explains the outcome of chkdsk
My report says:
Checking file system on C: The type of the file system is NTFS.
A disk check has been scheduled.
Windows will now check the disk.
334720 file records processed.
8107 large file records processed.
0 bad file records processed.
2 EA records processed.
41 reparse records processed.
389204 index entries processed.
0 unindexed files processed.
334720 security descriptors processed.
27243 data files processed.
CHKDSK is verifying Usn Journal... 35417640 USN bytes processed.
Usn Journal verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying file data (stage 4 of 5)... 334704 files processed.
File data verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying free space (stage 5 of 5)... 51577590 free clusters processed.
Free space verification is complete.
Windows has checked the file system and found no problems.
976751968 KB total disk space.
769806732 KB in 288876 files.
165524 KB in 27244 indexes.
0 KB in bad sectors.
469348 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
206310364 KB available on disk.
4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
244187992 total allocation units on disk.
51577591 allocation units available on disk.
Windows has finished checking your disk. Please wait while your computer restarts.
Guess what, after restart it stuck again on the error message described in my first posting.
A soft reset made windows start up ok again.
Well, with the help of google I found that several people had the same error message, like described in my first posting.
They found that it might be some kind of hardware incompatibility (DVD RW) or another person changed one of his RAM modules and the error disappeared for him.
It doesn't seem that there's a HDD fault and neither would then a reinstall of the OS help.
Will see if installing the 64-bit version of Vista makes any difference.