Something is corrupt...

I'm running Win 7 Ultimate/64.

The system has started taking longer and longer to boot, but I chalked that up to something else.

Today, I wanted to format a bunch of old floppies so I could throw them away, and the format command doesn't work from the command prompt. Neither does chkdsk. Nor can I right-click on the drive and get it to format.

When I type "CHKDSK C:" it says "NTFSNTFSNTFS"

When I type "FORMAT A:/F:1440" it says "A:A:" and waits for me to hit ENTER

I tried SFC / Scannow, and the log file says that I had two files with problems -- wdmaud.drv.mui and werfault.exe.mui.

SFC didn't complete, however; it got 13% through and said "Windows Resource Protection could not perform the requested operation.".

Any suggestions?

The other thing that comes to mind is that I have a TV tuner card installed. When I'm watching TV and doing things with the mouse (particularly dragging something in PowerPoint), the TV audio gets messed up. If I'm RECORDING the TV signal, the recorded stream is fine; it's just in the audio that it's playing on live TV. This may be totally unrelated; the TV-audio thing was messing up LONG before the other happened; I just thought it might be a helpful clue.

Larry Thomas

 

Bump - Please help!

 

[SOLVED] Re: Something is corrupt...

Finally got it solved.

I used sfc/verifyonly to see what all it would find, and I wound up having to

takeown
icacls
copy

9 or 10 different DLL/EXE files from another system. Once I got that done, sfc said it was all OK, and chkdsk and format were working again.

 

Glad that you got it fixed as I don't think that there are many folks here that have never used a floppy. I've used them since the mid 80's 'til about 7 years ago, I'd have never figured that out by myself. Anyways, why not just cut them up if they're 5 1/4" or crack open the case on the 3 1/2"'s or even easier pass a magnet over them. W7 and floppies is a strange mix indeed. I'll assume business related?

 

Thanks for the reply; it wasn't so much that I HAD to format floppies (I DID wind up just slicing up the 5-1/4-inchers with some kitchen shears). I was going through some old boxes I had in storage, and wanted to dispose of the old floppies, but I didn't want to toss anything personal or business proprietary. It just seemed safer to "shred" them by re-formatting.

The problem that was of more concern was the chkdsk wouldn't work, the format command from a command line (or right-click from Win Explorer) didn't work, the system was taking waaaaaay too long to boot, ... Clearly, there was something wrong at the system software level.

As for the 3-1/2 inch floppies, I wound up formatting all of them on an old Pentium Pro 200 Win 98SE box I have left around. I have an old sheet-feed scanner attached to the parallel port, but ever since Win 2K, parallel interrupts haven't been supported. The scanner uses a parallel interrupt to notify the system that a sheet has been inserted in the scanner and start the scan process. So, I keep an old coal-fired PC around for the old tasks. Sure, I could get a new sheet-feed scanner, but why pay for a new solution when the old one still works just fine?

I read somewhere that the last few versions of Windows would still READ 720 KB floppies, but not format 'em, so I just went ahead and formatted the 720's as well as the 1.44MB's on the old box, and then tossed them all in the trash.

At least the Win 7/64 box now seems to be healthy!

 

Hi

I doubt anyone would have much interest in getting the data off your floppies, BUT the fact is that formatting a disk does NOT permanently erase the data on the disk. Data recovery programs (even free ones like Recuva) can pull data from formatted disks. This applies to any disk - floppy, hard drive, flash drive, memory card, etc.

Again, I doubt most people these days even know what a floppy disk is, let alone how to use it, but I just figured I'd throw that info in for you for future use. There are programs that overwrite all sectors of a disk (even multiple times) such as DBAN, but personally I physically destroy disks that have personal data on them before tossing them.

 

Didn't know that!! Had always thought that a full format wiped a disk.
I have probably a couple hundred 360K floppies. Guess I'll cut them up before disposal.
Microsoft DOS Format command

Haven't used this, yet, but Eraser should do the job.

About DBAN

 

Yeah, I knew that re-formatting wasn't ABSOLUTELY safe, but, as with most things related to security, you have to weight the likelihood of an intrusion with the potential damage a breach could cause.

First, most of that stuff was OLD. It was likely of low value. The data ON the floppies probably would do no damage. The fact that my SSN was on one of the labels was much more dangerous (I scratched the label into oblivion with a screwdriver).

Second, the likelihood that the someone would find them in the dump and be willing to try to do anything with them was low.

Finally, the likelihood of anyone finding them in the dump, being willing to try to do anything with them, having a 3-1/2 inch drive, and being savvy enough to know that there ARE recovery tools that might be able to recover some or all of the admittedly low-value information from them seemed REALLY low.

So, I figured formatting was "good enough".