Philphollower

I contacted Compaq's (HP's) tech support and did a chat session with Darwin, one of their guys. He got me the HD utility specific to the OEM HD from Compaq, and everything checks out fine. Amazing what file error correction can do. I will back up the data again anyway, though -- our office computer has enough GB to swallow my laptop HD several times over ;-) Thanks, everyone. Cheers -- Phil

Thanks -- any suggestions re HD testing software? preferably shareware or freeware? ;-/

Thanks for the replies ... Yesterday the computer had several episodes of the trouble described above. I had to power it down withouth going through normal shutdown, and several times when I rebooted I got a message: "Operating system not found." Scary! though it did come back up after several attempts including unplugging and re-plugging the power and battery. I also contacted Compaq's online chat support, and Patrick walked me through a couple of basic things like emptying the minidump directory and deleting sysdata.xml files. I also ran the memory test from Microsoft's On-line Crash Analysis (http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp) -- which turned up no problems with the memory. I tried to run chkdsk (without /F) -- after several attempts with freezing and noise from the HD, it completed and identified file errors -- so I ran it again (with /F) and this appears to have settled things down. No new episodes or problems since. Given how unstable the system was before I ran chkdsk, I can't help but think that this must have done something close to the solution, anyway. But I'm still puzzled ... how would some file errors create so much chaos? Where would the file errors have come from? And should I still invest in another HD, just in case? My Windoze XP home appears to not have ScanDisk, can't find it at the command prompt, either. Is it built into Defrag now? Or is chkdsk the only such utility that comes with XP?

I'm running Windoze XP Home on a Compaq Presario 700 series laptop. I normally shut down at night, but during the day I'm on all the time, always connected to a home LAN and Internet, running Office 2000 and Firefox. I returned to my desk on Friday to see a dark blue screen with grey text beginning with something like "Kernel Stack Fault" error -- sorry I can't recall the exact term at the moment -- "Windoze is being shut down to prevent damage to your computer, ..." followed by instructions to restart if this hasn't happened before, and "Beginning physical memory dump ... " Unfortunately, it's happened a couple of times over the last 6 weeks. I also get a peculiar repeated clicking sound from the HD when this happens. I shut down the computer, unplugged the battery as well, and then reassembled it and started again. Now -- once before when this happened, it took several days before the unit would restart. No messages indicating that the HD had failed, despite the strange sounds -- though when I plugged in a couple of other HD's laying around the house, they worked. Is this impending HD failure, a RAM failure, motherboard problem, or software issue? Something specific that I should do about it, other than shooting it to put it out of its misery? ;-) Thanks, cheers -- Phil