Does this make sense?

vage

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OK so my boss gave me a computer to see what was on it before we decided to use it for something. So I boot it up, and right after it gets to through the BIOS, is freezes. The same thing happens if I try to bring it up in Safe Mode. So I take the hard drive and put it into an external enclosure. I bring it over to my machine which is running Vista Business 32-bit and do a check disk on it. I have done this several times before with absolutely no problems, actually it usually works very nicely.

So after that I put it back in the machine, and the same thing happens. So I put it back in the enclosure and hook it up to my Vista machine again. I can see the two partitions, and I can move through the file hierarchy easily. So we take it out again and put it into an XP machine and try to use Acronis Boot Loader to replace the image on the broken hard drive. But this time we cannot few anything in the Drives. Acronis realizes that they are there, but you can only go down about one directory on each drive.

My boss is trying to tell me that Vista added something to it when I did the check disk, but I've done this before and nothing has happened. He refuses to believe that the hard drive may just be fucked, and instead wants me to get rid of my install of Vista.

Basically, has anyone heard of this before at all? Does running check disk from Vista on a drive that is an XP boot drive screw things up? I can kind of see that there could be a problem just because they are different versions of check disk, but I've done it before and its worked fine, and the drive in question was broken from the start.
 
chkdsk in Vista is the same as it is in XP. It only checks it and fixes problems if any are found. Otherwise it makes ZERO changes to how the files are accessed.

I suspect that the OS was corrupted on the hard drive before you touched it (why else was the system sitting there unused?) so you may as well repartition, format and fresh install of XP or linux
 
chkdsk in Vista is the same as it is in XP. It only checks it and fixes problems if any are found. Otherwise it makes ZERO changes to how the files are accessed.

I suspect that the OS was corrupted on the hard drive before you touched it (why else was the system sitting there unused?) so you may as well repartition, format and fresh install of XP or linux

Ok see thats exactly what I told him, but he says that it must have found something and tried to fix it but hosed it instead. So lets say that it did find an error and tried to fix it. Would THAT cause Vista to "add" something to the drive to make it shitty?
 
From what I know, vista handles partitions differently.
 
one portion of chkdsk checks the data, and if it sees it is corrupted it tries to fix it... another part checks the drive itself like scandisk...
either way if there were corrupted files to begin with then it was hosed before you touched it, and Vista only tried to fix them, not break them

no matter what, Vista added nothing to the drive, only "looked" at the data
 
If the system wouldn't boot prior to connecting it to the Vista machine what difference does it make that it still doesn't work right? Either perform a recovery on the drive if there is something you need or format and reinstall.

Your boss sounds like a real pin head btw.
 
If the system wouldn't boot prior to connecting it to the Vista machine what difference does it make that it still doesn't work right? Either perform a recovery on the drive if there is something you need or format and reinstall.

Your boss sounds like a real pin head btw.

Thank you, and yes he is.
 
sounds to me like the drive is dying a slow painful death. I had a both a WD 250GB and a Samsung 500GB do that to me earlier this year. The system with the WD drive would just sit there with the spinning progress bar and never boot, even after I let it sit for two days :eek:

The samsung drive was in an RAID0 array and would fail intermittently. It would go three days or so with no problems, then the system would slow to crawl and BSOD. Upon reboot it would freeze after the POST screen. Then after some completely unpredictable amount of time, it'd start working again. After a couple weeks of this, I started getting read errors and the RAID manager flagged the drive as bad.

Vista doesn't handle partitions any differently that XP did, except that it can resize them on the fly.
 
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