2004-08-31 4:00 pm

[Tech]

Something funny happened to my laptop. Whenever I played any media file (wma with Windows Media Player or mov with QuickTime Player), I will get a system crasy saying "KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR" on the file atapi.sys. I went to Google and found the following link:

http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winxp/t1074443182

which does not seem to provide too much insight. And now I have problem booting up the machine. Once again it proves how fragile technology is. Sigh.

I then used the floppy disk drive to boot up Partition Magic, Partition Magic reported "Check Failed" on my work partition.

Boot-up another clean partition on the laptop and it was success. So it seems like something seriously messed up the working partition. It's good that I always keep a spare working partition though, so now I am going to first do some final checking on the "problem partition", and overwrite in case needed.

Somehow the harddisk is getting very irresponsive. That makes me wonder maybe the harddisk is dying ....

And then something else goes funky. I decided to simply get rid of the problem OS partition and replace it with the so called clean partition. BUt when I tried to copy it using Parition Magic, it says that the parition size is incorrect.

So I have to use scandisk to first fix the "clean c:" partition first. That took a while but eventually it processed well. Just when I was getting ready to copy the partition, I suddenly realized a huge problem.

The DVD+CDRW combo drive was NOT working.

This is very bad, because I rely on booting up the WinXP installation CD to process a bootcfg recure command. Without it, not only the newly duplicaed partition won't work, the original partition won't work neither.

I was fustrated, and try and try to see if I can get the CDROM working. AFter a few failed attempt (by pull and plug the CDRW drive, I sort of violently move the DVD reading and then plug in again. Surprsingly, I worked this time.

With the XP disc reciognized, I was about to copy the partition, but just the make the original partition more up-to-date, I tried to do a Windows update. Darn it failed as it hanged after installing the new ACtiveX for Windows Update. I said, screw it, I'll go ahead the partition copy.

And now the partition copying seems to work pretty OK, and eventually it's done.

AFter reboot, all seems like, both partition boot up properly, and I don't even need to mess with DVD Drive.

Now the ultimate test will be running a few media files and see if tehy worked out without crashing the machine.


EVerything seems to be back to normal now, except that I still have problem doing Windows update, I guess I'll worry about that mess later.


BTW, a side note:
Another article seems to recommanded using Knoppix 3.6 Live CD to recover problem NTFS partition. I haven't tried that one before, but seems to be something worth looking into:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7596