[Solved]CHKDSK ruined my Vista drive

**Timo** · January 18th, 2009 02:54 AM

Ok so I booted up my computer this afternoon after work, left, and came back to this - "Checking file system on D: (Named Windows Vista) The type of the file system is NTFS. One of your disks needs to be checked for consistency. You may cancel the disk check, but it is strongly recommended that you continue. To skip disk checking, press any key within 10 seconds(s)." - but when I read through it all it started. I thought everything was fine, it couldn't do any harm. I went and had some food, and came back to this screen:

Was initially worried but figured that doing a hard shutdown at this point would do more harm than good. Around two hours later it reached this point:

and three hours after it started it finished here:

So now when I try and boot into Vista I only get to a black screen with a mouse; HDD activity dies and nothing happens after 5 minutes so I figure it's dead. I tried to repair the install with the Vista disk but to no avail. At this point i'm not too worried because anything important (except my halo ce folder and tags, heh) is off of that drive and onto my Windows 7 one. But everytime I start up it tells me I need to run CHKDSK on my files drive, which is holding all of my photos. I'm worried that my computer might for some reason restart when I'm not there, and then automatically run CHKDSK when my computer boots and i'll lose all my photos, and my life.

So, I know I can use regedit to disable CHKDSK - but is there a more permanent solution, and can I recover files from the drive after chkdsk has gone through and borked everything up?

**beele** · January 18th, 2009 04:05 AM

Have you tried getting into safe mode? press F8(I suggest you start pressing it like 50 times in 5 seconds) before the vista loading screen comes on. You should get some sort of boot menu, and the option to boot into safe mode.

I can't guarantee that it will work though.

If you are really desperate, boot a Linux live CD, and mount your hdd in Linux, and see what you get there. (I recommend searching some tuts first for this.)

**Syuusuke** · January 18th, 2009 07:11 AM

Can't you take this HD, latch it on with the computer that has Windows 7 and take your phantastic photos from there? Or is it a laptop/full desktop?

Oh yea Safe Mode...

You don't have another OS installed on the same machine?

You could try reinstall Vista WITHOUT REFORMATTING.

**StankBacon** · January 18th, 2009 02:17 PM

remove the drive with your photos, don't take any chances.

**Timo** · January 18th, 2009 03:05 PM

Just to clarify I have two hard drives - one with just Windows Vista and a bunch of other crap. The other one is partitioned, one for files (photos, etc) and the other for Windows 7.

Booting in safe mode mode just brings me to the same black screen with the mouse, except at a lower res.

Edit: I just found that this W7 admin account and SYSTEM don't have any permission to do anything on the vista drive. It's going through every file now, rewriting the permissions. If I can't boot into vista still i might just grab everything off that drive and reformat.

**Boo Diddly** · January 18th, 2009 09:24 PM

Best bet would be to get the files and reformat. Basically the same thing happened to me, but I decided to do a hard reboot.

oops is all I can say >.>

Now I run with a backup image of my os and files on a separate disk. my current disk is a raid 10 in hopes that a HD failure does not screw me again.

not sure what exactly happened to cause the complete redoing of the file system. typically chkdsk doesn't screw that badly with your system unless something happend.