Reza Alirezaei’s Blog

Here is a nice Pre-Weekend surprise:

After an [Unwanted!] Windows update which restarted my computer the night before , I turned on one of my Windows 2008 machines and Windows froze at the start up progress bar. Basically , it shows the progress bar which is a good sign (Control has been handed over to the OS) , but immediately after that the screen goes black and Desktop never appears. I noticed that one of my hard disks goes grinding for 3 seconds , silent for 2 seconds and so on and so forth- I mean the same annoying sound pattern kept happening forever! Sounds like something is corrupted in my File System.

With my Google hat on, I found out that I am not alone in this , but most of the reported issues were related to the corrupted drivers. For what it’s worth , I never installed any new driver! Attempted “last known good configuration” , but no luck. Both safe mode options available in Windows 2008 also froze at crcdisk.sys command. I am like , WTF! I was just hoping that it was not the system drive that kept failing on me.

Finally opend up the case and took out the two non-system drives and rebooted. It booted up!… tried each drive with a new reboot , until I found the faulty drive. I took out that corrupted drive and put it into an SATA enclusure and hooked it up to the same box. Starange enough the OS reconginized it , but I couldn’t access the drive. Formatted it and put it back into the case and everything got back to the normal life before the crisis!

<Confession>Man, things like what happend to me on Friday scares the shit out of me. When do I want to learn the Backup lesson?!</Confession>