How to run CHKDSK on NTFS file system which crashes Windows?

I have a Win XP home system whose disk has been corrupted and which no
longer boots (fails with
"page fault in non-paged area", but the real problem seems to be a
corrupted file system).

I have a 2nd hard disk on which I installed a clean XP system. When I
either boot from that drive with the original drive plugged in, or
boot without the original disk and plug it in after a successful boot
(they're both SATA drives, which are hot pluggable), the system
crashes. In the "after successful boot" case, the system continues to
run for
about 20-30 seconds before it crashes while reading metadata from the
old drive. I can never get as far as running
CHKDSK, or Win Explorer, or anything else against this disk. Using
PartitionMagic against it shows various meta data problems, even
though the disk can basically boot. PM also says these problems can
be fixed by CHKDSK.

The trouble is that I can't run CHKDSK because Windows crashes (BSOD,
as indicated above) as soon as the disk is accessible. So, my
question is: is there a way to make the disk accessible to Windows,
but not have it access it,
so that I can run CHKDSK against it? Ideally, Windows would confirm
that it is an NTFS disk, assign it a letter, and stop, so that CHKDSK
could be invoked.

I know from using PartitionMagic that the disk hardware is fine.

Very grateful for any help..

Peter

 

You can put the disk back in the original machine
then boot to the repair console using your XP cd...
then run chkdsk /r

just note that since the drive is SATA you may have to load the drivers for
the controller first

 

Boot from the original WinXP setup CD and select the option which says
something about "Repair using Recovery Console". This goes to a DOS
like command prompt.

Then run CHKDSK C: /p

gb

 

Philo, Galus --

I tried this (just now again) and I can never get as far as a prompt
to run CHKDSK. I can successfully load
from a floppy disk the SATA drivers, but I get the same BSOD
PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA error
before it gets to the prompt.

Any other thoughts? I was hoping there'd be away to boot the clean
disk, then mount the bad one without having
WinXP start rummaging around in it, but there doesn't seem to be, eh?

 

Well the HD corruption might have been caused by a RAM problem

Before you do anything else. try running a memory test

http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp

 

Or he could try opening a command window and typing "chkdsk [drive letter]: /f"
without the quotes. It will tell him the drive is locked and ask him if he wants
to run it on next reboot, and he can say yes.

But the above area is a common memory error. I just had it today on this brand
new box, with one memory chip out of four being bad from the factory.