My Pc Rebooted Mysteriously During A Check Disk Scan

I started up my pc and went into my computer, and choose to use check disk on an external hard drive I have. I check marked both of the boxes in check disk, and the scan begun. I turned off my monitor because I didn't want to use the pc during the scan. I had no other programs running. After about two hours I saw my pc reboot on it's own by looking at all my led fans turn off and back on. I also obviously seen the bios screen and win xp load screen. What could have triggered this? I read somewhere online that if your pc reboots by accident or power failure during check disk your drive may lose all data or be worthless. What can I do? Why did this happen?

 

You may find this thread of interest.
How to debug a memory dump or a BSOD
http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=35246

Read it all carefully, the first step is to check the logs to see any info there(event viewer I think)

 

I run check disk from a command prompt, as I was told this is a more reliable way to do it. Start, run, type in cmd , the command prompt will open, type in chkdsk c:/r, hit enter. replace c with the letter of the drive, if you are scanning the c drive you will need to let windows know you want it done when the machine restarts by typing y and hitting enter. There is an article here if you need more info.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315265
In the article volume means the letter of the drive to check. Hope everything is copacetic.

 

Thanks for the help Bugballou... I was able to find out more about the problem this time. See what I failed to mention was the reason why I had run check disk on my external drive in the first place.

The problem is the fact that I have a very flaky 5 port usb pci card I need to replace. I've had it for about two years but it started acting up about 6 months ago. Sometimes some ports work and sometimes they don't. Plugging in devices will either work, freeze my pc, or reboot the machine. With the exception of one specific port that always works no matter what with any device. That's the port I had my external Western Digital drive plugged into. Well being an idiot I connected another one of my external drives [Seagate], to one of the ports that is flaky and the Seagate drive wasn't recognized by windows [Not a surprise to me], as per a pop up prompt message I read. So I unplugged the external Seagate drive from the flaky port and still had my other Western Digital external drive plugged in. I decided I didn't want to use my Western Digital external right after that happened so I choose to eject it through the safely remove hardware icon. When I did that the drive would not eject, as I would see a message saying to try to eject at some other time. Than out of nowhere I got two yellow message prompts in my systray that said:

Out of curiosity I looked at the files on the external and they were all gone! The folders were there but no files were inside. The disc space used was accurate but yet no files appeared on the drive.

So I did what no one would ever do in such a case but I had to. I shut off the external Western Digital drive and turned off my pc as well. I turned my pc back on and googled "$MFT, and $Bitmap". I came to find out that MFT means "Master File Table" which is a file on every hdd that identifies anything and everything on a drive. I also read that if the file ever becomes corrupt or something happens to it, people recommend running check disk which is supposed to fix the MFT [If your lucky].

So I ran check disk from within "My Computer" on the drive. I only selected the first box which wouldn't do a deep scan for lost sectors. The first box is what supposedly fixes MFT's. I than checked the contents of the drive and the files were there again! I felt like I needed to run the deeper scan on the drive using check disk with both boxes ticked which does more looking for bad/lost/damaged sectors, etc. & well when I ran that is when the problem happened when the pc rebooted.

So I took your advice and tried to run check disk through command prompt and it did run but it stopped at about 20%. I got the following messages [This time the pc didn't reboot! Thank heavens]:

http://i41.tinypic.com/15ogpjp.jpg


I read that you can view error messages in an application that comes with windows xp in the control panel called "event viewer". So I checked even viewer for the latest error entry message and saw this:

http://i39.tinypic.com/i5c588.jpg

I can't understand why check disk has an error while checking my drive with the deep scan and not the simple check disk scan. Could it be the data causing it? Check disk not being made for external drives? Or what?

Do I need to worry? My datas there now but I would love to check the disk for lost sectors, damaged data, etc. I don't know... You tell me what I should do. By the way the external drive is using NTFS not FAT. I don't know if that would be of any help but whatever.


Thanks