Windows XP forum: CHKDSK keeps repeating and restarting WinXP - what's wrong?

Sounds like you have a bad hard drive. Try booting from your Windows XP disk and at the first screen choose "R" for repair. WHen the prompt appears choose "1" for the first XP installation and type the admin password (if there is one). then type "chkdsk /r" and see what it does. This way it should tell you if it finds errors on the drive as it fixes them. If the chkdsk gets to a point where it doesn't move for a while (an hour or so) or your computer spontaneously restarts, then you know it's a bad hard drive.

Chkdsk is a utility that was introduced with Windows 2000. It's gotten a bad rap because of scandisk and all the problems that came with that utility. Chkdsk is free, comprehensive and best of all it's easy to use, unlike other disk utilities available from disk manufacturers.

However, you are right about the backup. If the system will boot now, you had better start backing up your important data because it may not last long. Unfortunately, a "reformat" won't help in this situation, it may buy you a few more weeks of use from the drive but eventually it will die permanently.

MS-DOS versions 2.x - 4.x used chkdsk.com while
MS-DOS versions 5.x and beyond used chkdsk.exe.

NT has ALWAYS used a chkdsk.exe that is considerably more robust and capable with the NTFS file system.

For the 16 bit DOS version, the only difference between earlier versions and Win 95 came about with the advent of the FAT32 file system and that difference was negligible.

While you are entitled to your opinion, Chkdsk.exe is a quite effective utility and essential to certain recoveries when a re-installation is neither desirable nor practical.

It would be interesting to hear of your experience that caused your unwarranted bad regard of a useful utility.

Bad hard drive is what worries me most. Yes the comp is now booted up and running fine, but I've lately been leaving it on perpetually on standby mode, I'm scared it won't boot again and I'll lose data. Some folks tell me this way is better than shutting it down, might prolong whatever life the HDD has. Some more questions:
A. Is leaving the comp on standby for prolonged periods good for the laptop's health?
B. Do I need to format both the C: and D: partitions, or just reformatting C: would be enough?
C. Do I need a change of HDD?

what caused you to run CHKDSK ?.
wer u having probs before ?.

Does your hard drive make a sound like its speeding up and slowing down on its own ? even though your not running any progs ?.

does it make a ticking or any odd sounds that it didnt make before ?.

1)always try to remember to save important info.
you may want to do that now if you can.

A)leaving anything on for long periods of time isnt good.

b)trick question - you have a laptop with 2 drives or 1 drive with 2 partitions ?.
--- either way you only need to format the one with the O.S on it .

c)depends , saving all your info to whatever backup u use then reformatting your drive , might be all it needs.

()-- if you have the money for a new H/d, I would still use this one , but make sure i had all info i wanted saved.. even when you think a hard drive is on the fritz - they can surprise you and last another
month , 6 months , year .

they will have various tools that you can run on your drive to assess its "health".

They may even have tools available to "low level format" your drive. This is not a true low level format but will effectively mark the drive so any bad segments will be made "unavailable" greatly reducing the risk of a write to a bad sector.

As mentioned, your FIRST consideration should be to back up any data (music, pictures, letters, etc) that you would be hard put to replace. Back this data up on a CD or USB drive as simply backing it up to another partition of the same drive would do no good at all should the drive crash.

It's pretty much a universal HD testing utility - can download floppy creator or CD image file to burn bootable CD

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

Thank you for the link. I downloaded that, and the instructions, but I'm not too confident about running on DOS as the instructions say, and I'm worried I'll end up making things worse than they already are - at least I'm booted up and working, and it's been a week since I just close the lid and leave the laptop on standby at night. Yet to get me the USB HDD that I'm looking to buy, once I do that I'll back up data and then go for it.

it ended up being my motherboard.......

I replaced my motherboard and upgraded my video (cause I could)

all is well with it now.......

Boot into Safe Mode and try running it from there, usually works.