Hdd woes under 98se on vectra vli8
I posted awhile ago about some series data corruption issues i experiencing under windows 98se.
I can install everything fine but after awhile the system crashes and won't boot, scandisk finds a multitude of long filenames and invalid directories. Upon dir'ing said directories under dos the are filled with nonsense and report sizes bigger than the capacity of the drive!
Now I though I had the problem licked after discovering that the drive was'nt mounted properly and was probably rattling, Its now firmly fixed to the box with regulation screws.
After a recent crash I copied my win98 folder to my D: partition(drive is a 40g maxtor partitioned into two 20 gig partitions) and installed from that.
After i reinstalled windows and the following software:-
Nero 6
Divx, 3vix and Xvid codecs.
Wmplayer 9
Graphics card drivers for an mga-200
NIC drivers
ABC bitorrent client
Forte agent
winrar
winzip
audio drivers
mouse drivers
direct x 9
and all windows updates
zonealarm
I then tried to unzip an ISO I had d/l'd from bitorrent, got the end and bam! crash. would'nt boot and had the same corruption problem.
Everythings been completely scanned for virus with an online scan and came back clean,
I repeated the process, same problem AND same folders! Identical system folders had been corrupted! C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\COLOR and C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\OOBE\(all sub folders).
After each reinstall c: was reformatted.
So any advice?
Some viral or malware code that was'nt picked up by the scan within the rar'ed iso? thing is the same error has been occurring since I built the system a couple of months ago, but this is the first time I've been able to identify specfic folder corruption.
the COLOR folder had an awesome set of files of single letters of every letter of the alphabet in all their accentted forms, though some letters were merely standard english.
This error has occured over over full repartioning and Formatting of drives and only affects the c: partition, sometimes data written from C: to D: is corrupt but never with the odd filenames or sizes, for instance mpegs that played fine on c: now come back as invalid files in media player.
Maxblast(or whixhever one is matroxs diagnostics disk, powermax maybe?) finds the drive error free under the most strenuous of tests, the disk nevers seems to run hot and my processers heat skin is never more than luke warm. Memtest finds my ram error free.
I'm beginng to suspect a faulty windows disk. Its seems odd to me to recieve the same corruption in the same folders three times in total!(the first time was'nt unraring anything).
Any theories would be most helpfull.
Original thread here