8860 - Scandisk - ARRRRGH!!!!

[Liz Walen]

My Pav-8860 running under Windows ME 4.3 has me about ready to toss it out a second story window. After a major software conflict (The Sims -sorry Maxis, no offense intended) despite installing all the patches suggested, including updates,fix it files, and changing graphic acceleration options, the system became so unstable, from lockups and fatal errors, to a complete crash, I was forced to wipe, format and restore using system recovery as well as all the updated files as suggested by Hewlett. Now, with a clean system, devoid of any additonal purchased software I ran the drives through the diagnostic process at the HP website and it found no errors or problems. However, when I went on to defrag the hard drive it spit out the error message: Defrag cannot access part of the hard drive due to damage. To fix disk run scandisk - thorough. I did so, first closing all programs running in the background, and disabling the hibernation option in power management. Much to my dismay, Scandisk failed, reaching cluster 3,663,489 of 3,749,816 clusters and then despite ample time to complete the task, did absolutely nothing beyond spin in place for hours. I attempted to rectify the problem using all suggestions from HP, but to no avail. To date I cannot scan the drive, cannot defrag the drive, and cannot run The Sims
successfully. Any assistance you can offer is greatly appreciated. Thank you.

rhianon@sympatico.ca

[Bruce Adler]

I just ran into exactly the same problem on my 8860. I've checked around the internet and found about a dozen complaints from other HP customers with the exact same problem. The common factor in all the complaints is that we all have a 60GB Quantum Fireball Plus disk drive.

After hassling with this problem for several hours I finally figured out exactly what's causing it. If you run fdisk on your disk drive I think you'll find that there's a mismatch between the size of the disk and the size of the C partition. HP screwed up and created a C partition that doesn't fit on the Quantum disk drive. This causes defrag to
fail when it tries to verify that it can move infrequently used files to the end of the partition.

To fix it, you have to spend about $60 on a program like Norton Utilities, Partition Manager or Partition Magic to repair and/or resize your C drive. Or, you have to delete
the partition and then use the recovery disk to completely reinstall your whole system (if you just do a reinstall without deleting the partition I suspect you'll still have a broken C drive).

I suspect that every HP customer that bought a system with a 60 GB Quantum disk drive and Windows Me is eventually going to run into this same problem.

HP refuses to admit that they screwed up. Rather the HP people I spoke to implied that I broke my system so I shouldn't complain about them telling me I'll have to waste two days reinstalling everything to fix their screwup.