Triangle & corrupt directory

I noticed something strange when I got on my computer this afternoon: there was a yellow triangle with a black exclamtion point in my system tray. (This is running XP Pro.) I hovered over it to see what it was but nothing popped up, and clicking on it (either left- or right-) just made it disappear. It showed up about 20 seconds later, and again clicking on it only made it disappear, ad nauseum. I checked my running processes and programs and there wasn't anything abnormal.

I don't know if this is related, but then when I tried restarting I got a "C:\M$fg is corrupt, please run chkdsk" message. (I'm not sure if that was the exact error message, but it was M$ and two letters.) Chkdsk ran when I got it restarted and now it looks like everything's back to normal. Any idea why these two things were happening?

m19

 

that comes up when a notebook has a low battery (the yellow triangle)

 

Well that would be quite a trick. I'm on a desktop.

m19

 

ya, i kinda got that hint before I posted that, windows 98 did that to me and i was on a desktop, except it didn't do the exclimation in the taskbar thing. The point is, a desktop has done it to me before too, and I'm not sure what causes it, but that is the icon it uses to show a battery low.

 

Weird... Came back from work on a break and my PC had the tray exclamation point again. But how can it be battery-related when I'm not running on battery?

m19

 

Maybe the battery in your desktop is low? Never heard of that icon in conjunction with a desktop before -- but, as you know, DTs do have a backup battery.

 

a cmos battery would have to be monitored using a specific utility as motherboards all report that voltage differently. If I had to take a guess I'd say that perhaps you've got some read errors or something. Check in your event logs to see what's been going on.

 

if you put your mouse over it, it should say something.. I'm with fw190.. something didn't load right or there was some other error and you should check your event log

 

Hovering and clicking with either button produces didlysquat , but clicking does make it disappear briefly before it comes back. From the time I left my computer and the triangle appeared the other day when it first happened, I hadn't done anything apart from having the system on: no installations, moving data, running programs, nothing. However, I will0 check the logs later tonight and report back with any findings.

I've had a system's battery die on me once before but never had this little icon... My guess is it's not battery-related, but like I said I'll keep rooting around and post any more info I can find.

I did notice one thing, however: I was using WinRAR around the same time it happened after not having used it for a while, and an archive I was working with had several bad header errors. I just checked again and the exclamation icon I'm getting in the tray is the same as WinRAR's. Could that have anything to do with it, or is it just a common XP icon that looks that way?

Thanks guys
m19

 

The only red Xs in the event viewer during the time I've been seeing the yellow triangle have to do with DCOM and StiSVC, and it looks like that's been happening for a long time, before the triangle showed up.

Anything else I can check?

m19

 

i got that symbol you are describing once... it was related to another person's computer on my network not having the proper IP address configuration....

 

Hey!!! Midget I think you might be on to something! I went through the logs again and there's a couple instances where it says that, something along the lines of another computer's IP not being valid or working or some such. We have 3 computers on the network in my apartment. That really narrows it down, but the question is... How can I make sure that we don't have this problem? One of my roommates just set up a new computer a week or two ago, so that roughly coincides with the exclamation showing up. Any idea what to do to fix it?

This is promising!

m19

 

yeah i'm guessing it's definetely related to that then.... i'm a pc newbie but i would recommend something along these lines:


on the PC's that aren't hosting the router, go into network properties and have them "automatically obtain an IP address"... on my network i have the cable modem and router connected to my comptuer and there are 4 other comps running off it... that little triangle started to appear when one of my roommates messed with his computer (not sure what he did), but i'm pretty sure he just auto obtained a new IP and i haven't seen the symbol since....


might want to check with some of the other Geeks on this site first, i'm not 100% sure if Auto Obtaining a new IP might screw with any of your Network Settings so beware...


hope that helps, morgan...

 

Thank you, I'll give that a shot tonight.

m19

 

Hmm, checked the other computers on the network and they're both set to obtain IP and DNS automatically (so's mine).

m19

 

yeah, make sure it's set on that and then hit OK again, and it should auto-obtain (again)....