It is apparent that you do not understand how hard disks work or what scan disk/chkdsk does.
A little explanation. Your hard drive is divided up in to sectors. The easiest way to think about it is to imagine that it is divided up like a pie is cut. There are tons of these little slices on your hard drive. When an OS writes a file to a hard drive it writes it to a slice. Most files take up a lot of slices so there is a thing called a file allocation table* which tracks which files are on which slice.
Sometimes there are problems. These problems are usually caused by not shutting down the computer correctly or having the PC powered off when it is writing files. Actual hardware issues can also cause problems. The problem is that some files were written to some slices on the hard drive but the file allocation table no longer knows what those files are or where they belong. At this point it doesn’t matter if they are deleted because the system already doesn’t know what they are. The damage was already done, chkdsk just found it.
The utilities chkdsk and scan disk check the file allocation table and repair any errors before they get too bad. You should be running chkdsk regularly. This is standard computer maintenance.
All operating systems have file allocation tables. All operating systems have issues with losing sectors on hard drives. All operating systems have utilities to check the hard drives integrity. On Unix, the utility is FSCK. I love telling people they need to FSCK their drive.
As others have said, you need to do backs up NOW as your hard drive might be dying.
Just believe what everyone is trying to tell you - you don’t understand how scandisk works or what it is used for. It works at a lower level than normal programs, checking whether the file system “makes sense” and if not it does its best to fix things so the file system “makes sense”. Your file system was corrupted (i.e. didn’t “make sense”), and scandisk did its job. The fact that repairing things trashed your old browser is unfortunate, but coincidental.
Two possibilities of file system problems that might not be immediately obvious but that scandisk would clean up - two file names pointing to the same location on disk; or a sector on disk being both allocated (i.e. it is part of a file) and free (it is on the list of sectors that is [supposedly] available for allocation when a new file is created). There are other possibilities as well. In both those cases at some point bad things are going to happen, but not necessarily immediately or even quickly. IF everything **always **goes as it should then things like that can’t happen. However, that is a very big IF.
Has your system ever crashed (particularly recently)? Have you ever turned off your computer without shutting it down properly, or had a power failure while you computer is running? Then your file system could have had problems resulting from that.
As I said in my other message, scandisk isn’t even a sensible program to use for what you are dreaming that Microsoft has in mind. A little sneaky code in IE or any other of your Microsoft programs would be much easier.
Agreed, people frequently and often quite understandably bitch about things that are truly wrong with Windows-based software/the OS itself. This, however, does not appear to be an actual error, but quite possibly a dying hard drive.
Little Nemo, my apologies if it seems like we are piling on to you.
For what it’s worth, at least recognize that your disk might be starting to fail, and you should do whatever you can to get any other important files/info on it copied to somewhere else.
If want some further ideas about how to do that, feel free to ask.
I understand that bookmarks are often used for the irregularly-visited website, or one with a long name that would be a pain to enter manually, or even just because you use it a lot. But I would be astounded if a list that’s 10 years old isn’t full of dead or missing links and if most of them had been opened at any point in this year. I have bookmarks that I did need several times a couple years ago but will never need again and I just haven’t gotten around to deleting them yet. It just makes me wonder how much of any real value was lost.
C:/Documents and Settings/COMPAQ/Favorites on my XP Laptop.
(Am I the only one that would prefer not to have spaces in file or folder names?)
I was surprised to see that a single “bookmark” is a file sometimes exceeding 1 MB in size! I didn’t try to study the contents but noted that the bookmark for SDMB has many many advertisement URLS.
You can also export bookmarks to a file using Import/Export from the File menu in IE. I would do this (it spits out an .htm or .html file) and then back this file up online somewhere as it should be fairly small. Attach it to an email and send it to yourself or put it on a USB drive or something.
As for the OP’s problem, there is no conspiracy here. The part of the computer he used the most is the part that broke. The sectors surrounding his old browser were the sectors being written to every day hence they were the first ones to fail. No mystery at all. The only mystery at this point is how much longer that hard drive has left in its life.
This thread reminds me of the time my mother got it into her head that the reason she couldn’t log into her email was because there was something wrong with the fonts on her computer.
[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
I have a web browser I use. It’s old and offically outdated but unlike many newer products it works…And today I found out what was “corrupted” on my hard drive - I was using a non-Microsoft product. Windows was deleting my other web browser.
[/QUOTE]
Yup…
Newer is usually NOT BETTER!! (Newer is usually ugly/over bloated crap!!)
They purposely detect bad things IF IT ISNT THIER OWN S/W cause they naturally want you using thier over bloated/intrusive crap! (They have become QUITE intrusive into ppls lives and its sad)
I’ve seen plenty of people mention that the OP’s HDD might be failing, but another consideration might be spyware. No idea what he has for anti-virus/firewall protection, but it’s possible Norton or what-have-you is detecting an infection and trying as best it can to destroy the threat.
I do PC & laptop repairs in a small shop, and spyware and re-installations are our bread and butter. I don’t think that ScanDisk or ChkDisk is part of any effort by Microsoft to eliminate rival browsers. In fact, I’m sure of it because I’ve seen several occasions where after running anti-malware scans, on reboot ChkDisk actually target files like iexplore.exe, without which you can’t even run IE.