Planetarion Forums

Apothos · 26 Oct 2004, 13:15

So this morning, i left my PC on and went downstairs to go eat breakfast. When i got back, the system had froze, and everythign was static except for the mouse curser which was in hour-glass mode and moveable.
I attempted to reboot with ctrl, alt, delete, but it didnt work. After several attempts i just hit the reset button.
During the reboot, it stopped at "Verifying DMI pool..." (or somethign to that effect), and would go no further. After several failed attempts to get past this, i used a boot disk and got to the dos prompt. When i checked the primary partition of my 250GB hdd, it said it was an invalid media type.

The drive is partioned as follows:

C, E, F, G

D is a seperate HDD.

Now, fdisk told me that partition C was a DOS partition, but of UNKNOWN type (further along the columns).

I had to format drive C and reinstall my OS and am currently half-way through setting up my PC from virtually scratch becasue i've lost the registry.

I was curious as to what would/could have caused such a catastrophic event, incase there is anythign i can do to prevent this, other than ghosting my drive more often to avoid the reinstalling.

Thanks for any help.

JetLinus · 27 Oct 2004, 22:45

Hmmmm, catastrophic indeed.
Should really be a hardware problem, although you never know...

[I recently learned that turning on the DMA option in Windows 98 for an old 2GB drive that doesn't support it can completely screw and waste your FAT ;-)]

Anyway, the "DMI pool..." stuff would make it seem like a hardware defect, as it's still in the BIOS stage before any software gets touched.

Try some drive health monitoring tools like SMART-Monitor or HDD Monitor or O&O DriveLED or AIDA32 (and go to the S.M.A.R.T. section) to see what the status of your drives is. High numbers for recent fail-counts or read-/write errors indicate a problem.

Also I'd suggest a thorough test like ScanDisk / CheckDisk, or use "Format C: /U /C", as the C-parameter checks every unit for drive-errors.

[Oh, I just checked, apparently the option /U has gone for NTFS-format, and /C means Compress now... Anyway.]

And maybe check PartitionMagic Error-Reports.

JetLinus · 27 Oct 2004, 22:47

Oh and be careful, after a crash like you described or some HDD failure, drive letters aren't accurate anymore. They can disappear, and others take their place. So a thing that used to be D: and was your swap drive could no be E: with your valuable backup data, so be careful then if you don't know if drive-letters were re-sorted.