[ArmandBanana]

Hello out there

I signed up because I'm looking to see if anyone knows anything about drives "spontaneously" corrupting under XP SP2. In my case these are all ordinary Parallel ATA drives, had the same problem with Hitachi, WD, and Maxtor.

I do a lot of freelance side work with simple installations and "refresh" a lot of seriously buggered operating systems by doing clean installs for people. Usually pretty simple work. I have had a problem twice now with two different computers where at least one previously functional "auxiliary" drive on a system suddenly becomes unreadable to Windows XP and reverts to "Logical Drive" in Explorer, or "Unknown" under XP Setup. This has only happened to me on systems already updated to SP2.

Chkdsk attempts to correct the data loss, and finds thousands or millions of "orphan" data entries, which it deletes and rewrites for hours.. sometimes fixing problems, sometimes ruining files. Basically Chkdsk seems to be rebuilding the entire file structure. I end up with some of the original data, a few directories with names like "found.001" containing hundreds of displaced folders called "dir0013.chk" etc. usually containing only some of their original contents.. and a LOT of corrupted files. THe last time was a 250 GB drive--chkdsk found about six million orphaned file entries and "fixed" them but good. A perfectly healthy 250 GB drive was "striped" with crap and about 75% of the recovered files were corrupted. Almost a total loss.

THEN I discovered something at what would have been the third time I lost a drive. Normally the secondary drives are never a problem, so once the critical data is backed up I just install the new OS on the reformatted primary drive, and it's good to go. This time I was installing a new hard drive with a fresh copy of XP on an SP2 system, and again one of the drives came up "Unknown" during setup. Since I still had the original OS backed up on another drive, INSTEAD of running disk utilities this time, I took the corrupt drive out of the computer and continued XP setup. When I'd finished setting up the brand new drive, I took it back out and put the original XP SP2 boot drive in the computer again and started it up. When I ran XP from the original drive, the "corrupted" drive was magically all better again. However the "corrupt" drive STILL will not work under the fresh installation of SP2. The system believes it's damaged and wants to "fix" it.

Old SP2 install = drive works.
Fresh SP2 install = drive corrupt.
?

Completing all the security updates didn't fix the problem. The "corrupt" drive data won't show up in any computer other than the one it was originally in, with the original XP install it ran under. These drives function fine when reformatted.

Maxtor tech support said "Windows XP SP2 puts a new kind of drive signature in the MBR, has something to do with NTFS security, sometimes that causes data corruption, (???) --it's not the hardware" I ran three different diagnostic utilities including Maxtor's and the HDD did pass 100%.

Does anyone know about this, or what changed in SP2? Do you HAVE to have an SP2 install disk from the get-go to reinstall XP after SP2? Most people don't.. I don't know how to reinstall a computer now without screwing up random hard drives if this continues.. 300 gigabytes is a LOT to back up to DVDs every time someone needs to refresh their OS..

Armand