[Jill2421]

I have been having a problem with my D drive where every time I start up or restart my computer it runs a scandisk (thorough scandisk) and I'm told there are errors within my D drive where some information might be lost or damaged. When I tell it to fix the problem, the same message keeps popping up and eventually I have to just cancel the scandisk and it never gets fixed. I had this problem when using Windows 98 and I still have it after I recently upgraded to Windows ME. Is there any way I can fix this drive. I've checked for viruses using Norton antivirus and I had AVG antivirus and both came up empty for viruses. Also my D drive capacity is 2.51GB and I'm currently using 2.03 with only 493MB free. Is that normal because I don't remember it always being this full. By the way my D drive is labeled as "SYSTEM_SAV [D:]" if that means anything to whoever can help me.

thank you

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drive don't like being to full, may be the problem. can you dump some files/

[peterm]

drive don't like being to full, may be the problem. can you dump some files/

[Jill2421]

I tried disk Cleanup to remove any extra files that I didn't need, but nothing came up. What files would I be able to remove without causing a problem. When I click on the D drive there are 3 folders marked "CPQDRV" "CPQS" and "DATA" there also is a MS-DOS batch file named "CONFIG" and a SKU file named "R51.SKU" The "CPQDRV" folder takes up about 400MB, "CPQS" takes up 6MB and the "DATA" takes up 1.45GB. Any suggestions of what could be erased because I would erase it all if I knew what I was doing.

[peterm]

did you put the files on the disk or where they there when you got the computer.
Is this a second hard drive or a partition of 1 drive

[bdlt]

before deleting any files, do a backup of all of your 'cannot lose' files.

are there only 3 folders on the d: drive? do you boot form the c: drive? if the answer to both is yes, drag the data folder from d: to c:. you may need to rename the folder if there is a DATA folder on c:. check the free space on c: before transferring.

if the c: drive does not have enough free space, then we can look for large files to delete.

[Jill2421]

Could it be possible for me to delete all the files and folders in the D Drive and still have a fully functioning computer? I transferred the DATA folder into the C drive and I'm still getting the same error. Whenever I restart my computer or simply start up my computer with a cold boot I get an error saying I improperly shut down the computer (even though I didn't). Then scandisk runs and when it gets to the D drive I get an error that says something like cluster 658,122 of 660,036 has missing or damaged data. Then I tell it to fix it and I get a message saying "D:\CPQDRV\156026\00A\002\156025.ZIP" is lost. Can I delete all the files in the CPQDRV file or are they important?

[Tyger]

OK. you've got an older Compaq which has all the backup and reinstallation files are in the D: partition of your hard drive. The drives used in a lot of them were the old Quantum Bigfoots, which were large, slow, noisy and prone to failure. You might want to start looking for another hard drive, even a good used one that is that size or somewhat bigger.

What model do you have?

[Jill2421]

I have a Compaq Presario 5000. I got it 5 years ago in June 2000.

[Jill2421]

I just restarted my computer with my Windows ME emergency diskette and went through scan disk with that for drive D. I got this message:

"Scandisk cannot read from last cluster on drive D. This cluster is either damaged or your system is not configured properly. Drive D may need to have Logical Block Addressing (LBA) enabled to work properly, or its disk partition may be incorrectly marked as a non-LBA partition. Data lost can occur if your LBA setting or disk partition type for this drive is misconfigured.

Check your computer BIOS setup utility, or contact your computer manufacturer"

I have no idea what any of this means. How can I go about fixing this problem?? Also how do I check my computer BIOS setup utility and what should I check it for?

By the way, I recently deleted everything in drive D before doing this, yet I'm still having the problem.

Thank you for any help you can offer

My next step is to factory restore my computer.

[peterm]

why do you want to restore
Is your computer running ok as it is besides D drive?
if you have deleted all files on d drive then we will just reformat D

[Jill2421]

Thanks for all your help. I just reformatted D and afterwards it said to run scandisk and I did and it froze during the last cluster 658,401 of 660,198. I have no idea why. I also emptied the drive yet there is still 40KB being used (I know that's next to nothing but not sure what is using that space). Anyway, my computer no longer tells me I have had an improper shut down after every start and restart, and does not automatically run scandisk when I boot the machine so I guess it's fixed good enough for me. Even though the D drive isn't fully fixed I don't know what else to do but just leave it alone.

[peterm]

there is always a spare left over.
your drive is in effect fixed this means it has been marked as a sector
where information won't be written to