Chkdsk won't run

[MaxBurn]

I have a laptop here that I can't run chkdsk on C:. It's Windows XP and I can schedule a chkdsk for the next startup as normal but it just skips it on the next reboot and never does the chkdsk.

I found some references to zone alarm causing the problem, but I don't have that. I found a microsoft knowledge base article 823439 that says install SP2, which I have. I had the part of Norton Systemworks loaded for Ghost, I uninstalled that and it still won't do a chkdsk.

Think Systemworks was the problem? Think a full manual uninstall will fix that?

 

[sechs]

Try setting the dirty flag manually with fs

 

[MaxBurn]

No joy, just boots straight up. Or were you refering to something else I didn't catch?


C:\>chkdsk /f
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Cannot lock current drive.

Chkdsk cannot run because the volume is in use by another
process. Would you like to schedule this volume to be
checked the next time the system restarts? (Y/N) y

This volume will be checked the next time the system restarts.

C:\>

 

[sechs]

http://www.windowsitpro.com/Article/ArticleID/25516/25516.html

 

[MaxBurn]

Thank you, that's handy to know.

The utility reported that the flag was already set. I set it again and rebooted, still no checkdisk ran on the reboot.

I ran chkdsk in read only mode and it found the problem I was expecting. I can't open a specific folder, says it's corrupted etc.


Aditional info that might be of use:
-I got a new hard drive for this computer a little while back. I just ghosted the old one to the bigger new one and it seems to work fine other than this.

-I had system works 04 installed, not the whole thing just the ghost portion. I didn't use that to do the transfer on this laptop though, I just installed systemworks to make more of the ghost boot floppies. In fact I installed that after I did the hard drive transfer on this machine. It's now uninstalled though.

-What I havn't done is put the old hard drive in and see if that does a chkdsk properly, I still have the drive in my spare parts bin.


Think it's time to format? I was thinking about a reinstall first maybe.

 

[Mercutio]

Have you tried running it from the recovery console?

 

[sechs]

If you used Ghost to resize the partition, it does have a habit of farking up the file system structures.

Merc's suggestion is a good one.

 

[MaxBurn]

Aww man, your going to make me go and find the cdrom and a xp disk? Recovery console did work though. Still won't boot up and do a chksdk and I just discovered that it won't even boot up in safemode, just hangs forever at mup.sys. Wonder what's wrong with this thing, guess I am going to have to format to fix it though right?