pulled plug on defrag

[violettj]

Hi all,

A friend's pc was running defrag when someone pulled the plug. I haven't looked at it yet so I don't know it's current state. All they told me was that windows doesn't come up anymore. My question is will defrag continue when power is reapplied or will the drive be corrupted and need to be rebuilt? This is a gateway pc. What is the key to startup in safe mode?

John

[JohnGray]

I pulled out a 128 MB USB hard disk "Pen Drive" from the USB socket yesterday, accidentally, because I thought it had finished doing the defrag. It hadn't. I tried doing a ScanDisk on it, but it just looped with the little red light on the USB hard drive flashing merrily. 112 "*.CHK" files each time I tried. I had to reformat it using my XP box. And recopy the data files it previously held.

In your circumstance, Defrag will most certainly not continue when power is reapplied. If you can't boot at all, you don't have a Safe Mode, nor much of an operating system left, probably.

This is where the usual cheerful suggestion is to "boot from a Windows 98 floppy disk, reformat the hard disk applying the Windows 98 system boot files, reinstall Windows 98, and restore all the data from your most recent backup". There may be no alternative to this, unless someone else can come up with a good idea...

It always used to be said (some time back, this is) that the Defrag program is a conditional destruction of the hard disk - it doesn't do the destruction provided the Defrag operation finishes without errors...

John

[violettj]

Oh boy. I hope they didn't have any important information on it as it was a home pc and like 99% of users, no backups. They just got a new Dell so if I can't reboot, maybe I'll try placing the drive in the dell as a slave and see if there is any important data. Otherwise, I'll have to rebuild it so they can use it again. The plan now is to use it for education purposes in a daycare.

John

[JohnGray]

John (you don't know how near I came to calling you Violet!!)

Your idea about putting the current hard drive as a secondary drive in a different PC is about the best way of getting off any files, if you can't boot from it.

But if the file system structure is "stuffed", to use a British expression, you might not be able to get at any/many of the original files, and you'd have to try to use something like Norton Utilities (as was) to try to reconstruct files from the disk sectors holding data -- which could take a short lifetime.

Good luck!

John

[bigaldoc]

You and "the other John" are probably right, but before I give up on it, I'd certainly try booting it with a floppy boot diskette to see if you can "see" the C: drive. It's remotely possible that one or more of the key boot files is missing or corrupt - Command.Com, IO.Sys, MSDos.Sys. Remember that the MSDos.Sys file "tells" Win98 how to boot and it could be missing or corrupt. I've not had this kind of mishap (Defrag) before but have had corruption cause Win98 to fail to boot. Also, the master boot record could be damaged and an FDISK /MBR might possibly help. Anything to try to avoid the worst case.