Monday, January 27 2003 - Mon, 27 Jan 2003

Started the computer up first thing in the morning and … “Sector not found reading drive C. Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?” Oh oh! The new drive was working well for 10 days. What is this? I select Abort and get: “Registry File was not found. Registry services may be inoperative for this session” and then “XMS cache problem. Registry services may be inoperative this session” and finally “While initializing device VKD: Windows protection error. You need to restart your computer. Press any key to continue”. Tried a number of different things like I did 10 days ago. Couldn’t get access to the drive. Unbelievable! I was working last night for several hours on the computer. It shut down fine. No indication of problems.

Sigh. Let’s see what we can do. Called Western Digital Tec Support 1-800-275-4932. I was #41 in the hold queue and it said an approximate wait of 16 minutes. It kept updating my status every two minutes, which was nice. Talked to Charles. He had me run the Data Lifeguard Tools. They showed nothing wrong. I asked about the Bios settings and LBA. He said they only help ensure the drive is working and help get it installed. For Bios settings, I need the manufacturer of the computer. Great! He suggested wiping it out and starting again. What!? It’s been working fine for 10 days. I just want to get it working again. He’s reluctant to talk any more and I let him go. At least from my talk with him, I know there is nothing obviously wrong.

But now I am getting a bit worried. I have 10 days of Behold work and my family’s other stuff on the new drive and I can no longer access it. For a couple of hours, I try most everything and can’t get the drive to start up. When booting from DOS, the drive will not let me read from it or write to it, giving the the “Sector not found reading drive C” error whenever I try. No way to change the registry and get my data off.

Reboot from C. Still the sector error. If I press Abort, it gives: “Windows has stopped. Press CTRL+ALT+DELETE to restart your computer”. Bother. Try renaming the registry files so that the backups will be used. Can now startup on D drive, but for some reason the C drive only appears to have about 10 GB on it. No! The C and D drives were switched. It is starting on the old drive as I hadn’t deleted the Operating System from it. Everything was intact and 10 days old. But then I really lucked out. When I went into Windows Explorer, it could see the new drive and read and write to it! First thing I do is copy over my Behold backup and a few other important files. Now Scandisk the new drive, and it says no problems. My thinking is that this should reset the lock on the C drive. It has in the past. Reset the boot sequence to the C drive. Still won’t start: Sector not found. Now even Scandisk isn’t fixing this. Go to a DOS startup disk. It says to run Scanreg which then freezes on me. Reboot. Try again. Get the VKD error. Reboot off the old D drive. Look at the registry now on the C drive and it is a one-year old copy of the registry. I thought Windows saved backups every shutdown. I knew that wouldn’t work. Scandisk C again. Find a recent copy of registry and put it on the C drive. Still get VKD error. Reboot on D. Go to Google and lookup “While initializing device VKD” and I find that error is referring to the keyboard driver. But the keyboard works when I boot from C so that can’t be it. Reboot off C anyway. Unplug and replug the keyboard. Same problem. Try rebooting in DOS mode. Deleted the registry. Finally got it going again from C drive, but the registry it is using is on the D drive, like 10 days ago. I’ll leave it like that for awhile and fix other things up. Do a scandisk again. Cannot read from last cluster. Fixed. Filesizes of some files were wrong (including an old copy of the registry): fixed, but effectively destroyed. Also getting a message at bootup: “GRI antivirus cannot init CORE (AVG6.AVE ?)” meaning there is a problem with my antivirus program. Tough day. Not there yet.