impending HD failure?

[jakkwb]

Greetings all-
I have a PC I am working on. The HD is very flakey. When I run scandisk (win95 will not boot). It gives several screens of filenames with jibberish and goobledegook for the filenames. I click on FIX. After a while, I will get another message that says the root dir is full - delete some of the CHK files. When I exit and do a DIR, I get several files with jibberish filenames and the reported sizes of these files VERY large. Is this a sign of HD failure (Or about to) or maybe a virus of some sort?

Thank you,

Al

[MacGyver]

Could be either. You can try scanning it with a floppy based virus scanner. I'm leaning towards FAT corruption. My advice is to trash the HD and put a new one in, either way the data on the HD is obviously so corrupted it's not worth trying to save.

HD's are so cheap nowadays it's not worth trying to save a failing one. Give the owner something reliable and offer to sell him a tape backup unit or a CDRW to make proper backups.

If the owner wants you to try to salvage the drive and/or data, make sure you have him/her sign the papers authorizing hourly rates and go at it.

[mahdi]

I've seen this case many times...look at it this way
Any data that is on that drive is now a 'was' on that drive. I've never been able to salvage any data from a drive that crashes like that. I've saved the drive by formating the MBR and then the drive (a low level would be the best in that case)

But MacGyver is right, with the prices on HD's today, it would be easier to get a new one.

[Wayward Clam]

I agree the drive is safer replaced, but I don't think you are completely screwed for data. If there is something crucial on there try Lost & Found or a similar program (there are some available on the Tech Tools section on this website).

[jakkwb]

thanks everyone for the replies. I am in the middle of re-formatting and re-installing right now. So far, so good.

Can anyone reccommend a good virus checker that will fit on a floppy?

Thanks again,

Al

[KINGofBLEH]

The problem is most likely a result of a bad antivirus pattern update from Norton. What happens is that Norton installs the CHK files in the root of C: with no stop bits at the end of the files. This leaves the files open-ended with an infinitely increasing file size. Norton has published a fix for this on their web site. Of course reformatting will ultimately do the trick.In the future, though, if you have this fix you will need to delete all of the CHK files in the root of C:, run scandisk, and install the bug fix. Then you will need to rerun LiveUpdate to reinstall the AV patterns.

I am not aware of this issue with other AV proggies at this time.