Diskeeper 7 and CHKDSK problem

I upgraded from ME to XP, ran for awhile, then used CONVERT to go from FAT32 to NTFS. All worked OK for awhile, and I could defrag and NTFS was recognized by Diskeeper 7. Then, on a second defrag, there was a huge amount of defragmentation. I ran Diskeper 7 again, all looked OK, but there were many directory files, spread widely on the disk, so I set the boot time defrag with options to consolidate directories and run CHKDSK.

Now, Diskeeper won't run because it says it is waiting for the CHKDSK to run. However, on boot-up, CHKDSK does not run. From a CMD window, I ran CHKDSK without the /f option to see the status of the disk. It found a problem, so I tried running CHKDSK again with the /f option, but it said that the c: drive was in use by another process and would not run. See attached screen shot of the CMD dialogue regarding the above.

Diskeeper reports that CHKDSK will run at boot time "as requested by the operating system or another application."

Then I booted up from a floppy.
At the >a prompt, I entered c: <Enter>.
The response was "invalid drive"

'Any ideas?

 

What kind of boot floppy did you boot to? The old Win98/ME boot disks don't read NTFS, and will call it an invalid drive even if it's fine.

The scattering during defrag and failure of chkdsk to run at boot are not great signs. Does Diskeeper have utilities on floppy or CD that you can run directly? If so, I'd try running chkdsk directly from that. You might be able to boot to command prompt only and see if you can run chkdsk /f from that, but even that may not allow it to fix things.

 

Try running chkdsk /f (or better yet /r) from the Recovery Console:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;307654&Product=winxp

 

Well gang, I got the problem fixed. Rather, a great support guy from Executive Software International gave me the solution to the problem. Getting the right answer from support people today is rare enough, but in this case, the problem was with another product, not Diskeeper (Executive Software's product). I had contacted them, thinking their product might be causing the problem. It turns out that ZoneAlarm was the culprit!

See the attached text file of my e-mail thread with Diskeeper support for details.