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Messages - lmitchell

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1
Okay. I opened explorer via notepad via command line. There are some accessible txt logs - ntbtlo from today, bcdlog from a couple of weeks ago, Tweaking.com repair set up log from Monday. They may be of limited used considering nothing can be run  to force corrections from the state I,m stuck in.

2
I don't think those points actually exist. I think they're from external backups done with Macrium or EaseUS that were somehow not deleted from whereever backups are listed.

Occassionally I,ve done Disk Cleanup and have selected the "Delet All But Most Recent Backup" to regain drive space. I did so as recently as last week. But I've also installed updates since then.Windows is supposed to make backups before updates, but I can't count how many times I've checked that restore is activated (System -- Advanced Options) yet it shows 0MB restore points. Should have been a clue to keep better backups, but I don't trust Windows restore options and EaseUS and Macrium frequently fail partway through or during verification, so I've done it less and less frequently.

3
Our last posts crossed, except mine didn't post. I,ll try to be brief (impossible for me, I know) repeating it -

A few posts I found mentioned the black screen / mouse cursor as being caused by file permissions and resolved by successfully resetting to defaults. That seemed plausible to me considering TWR spent hours changing them during stage 2, probably 80percent of the time it was running. I wanted to do so (for all maybe, not just the syste m) but the instructions online were confusing and/or not formatted well. Probably better to not have taken the chance.

I also remembered that I made a restore point from within TWR along with the registry backups. Where is it and is it acceptable to and usable by Windows System Restore? I've had Volume Shadow Copy and System Restore always active but its been hit or miss whether restore points are in the panel when I need them. Sometimes there have been none.

I would have tried it already if theire were useable points. There are three from 2014 and those were long gone sequential backups to an internal drive. I probably made one othe restore point from within a program when I was doing scans.  No idea which program, where it is or even if can be restored external to the program that created it.

So am back in restrui and only the same three two-year old points are showing there.

4
All the external drives are USB. Three are WD 1TB. Two are 2.5" laptop drives in Orico nonpowered enclosures.

5
I just rooted around in the BIOS to make absolutely sure I,m overlooking nothing, even though I've been in scores of times before. No way to reset any hard drive options as you've decribed.

I also took the opportunity to run a quick HP diagnostic on the drive. This panel is oonly for memory and hard drive. The comprehensive panel disappeared when I updated the BIOS months ago.

Itks only a quick test but the SMART test is reporting as PASSED and the Short DST as passed. HDD Sentinel and Ashampoo HD monitor both reported the disk as healthy when I was last able to check. I keep them running in startup. The latter recognized probelms (two abnormal resulst in the 50 or so parameters) but stated they were not yet significant.

Despite the crashing problem I had, triggered in part by Firefox loading certain pqages, and probably some software conflict with the 25 or so startup programs (which has been okay up to now), *everything* was fine until TWR crashed to blue screen in safe mode with networking (where I was running the scan, as recommended) and I signed back in and was confronted by the black screen and cursor. Cause and effect. That 8kb bad sector is a problem that needs to be dealth with and heeded, but is not the cause his issue.I,ve  had  dying drives before and the behavior is not so predictable.

I'll try whatevr is recommended next but cannot automatically agree that this has originated *because of* these bad (bypassed, no?) sectors, which may have come about because of multiple hard restarts over the last 2-1/2 days.


6
Classpnp has been coming up over and over as I've attempted safe mode. Some sites state that it isn't the last driver that shows that is the problem, but the one that comes after it. For all I know and the others know it's supposed to be the last one. Does anyone even pay attention before there's a problem?

I have a couple of external nonpowered enclosures? Is there anything to be gained from putting the internal drive into one and trying to boot, or would that driver conflict still likely occur? Would an external boot be possible without external power to the drive?

7
I've ssen the reported success with the BIOS but the one in this HP Pavilion is relatively crude and doesn't offer a lot of fine-tuned options. The Dell desktop I had prior to this was more traditional and had all the options.

I have my Windows version imaged on a bootable USB. I'll just have to clean reinstall, copy my documents in and start from scratch. I'd reallyn really prefer to get back in this one, image my hard drive, possibly then try a last-ditch upgrade install to stabilze the crashing (which I know was due in part to browser plug-ins), then image the stable version and ditch this drive.

Right now the chkdsk is at 57percent complete and reported recovering orphaned files into directory files (3 of them) and Lrepairing the security file record segment". 10 index entries from the same file were deleted ("(eleting an index entry with Id xxxxx from index ?SII of file 9").

Well, it completed while I was typing that. Jumped back into regular startup, Starting Windows, back at the black screen with cursor, and even hearing that sound it makes when theinternal usb or wireless card or whatever activates.

Now I'm going to hard restart again to create more index error and try VGA safe mode one last time.

8
Regarding devices, I removed everything I was able in sequence, with corresponding restarts, prior to contacting you: the battery, the hard drive, the wireless card and the memory sticks. I also had removed the battery and power adapter, held down the power button for 30 seconds, reassemble and restart after 20 minutes, which has worked with the black screen with blinking line cursor problem sometimes.

As an absolute last resort I can open the whole thing up, disattach the monitor from the motherboard, restart, reassemble etc, but considering how problematic that will be I don't want to deal with it until eveything else has been eliminated. I've completely disassembled this many times to clean, replace fan, replace thermal paste and other stuff so it's not a big deal for me to open it up.

9
VGA showed the Starting Windows swirl icon, then "One of your disks needs to be checked for consistency. You may cancel the disk check, but it is strongly recommended that you continue.
Windows will now check the disk."

So now I'm being run through chkdsk again, less than 10 hours after the last one ended. I doubt these hard shutdowns are good for the system but it's the only way to restart when confronted by the black screen. I hope this doesnt turn out to be another 8 - 10 hour scan.

10
Regular start and standard Safe Mode both went through to black screen with mouse cursor.

Safe Mode with Networking and Safe Mode with Command Prompt are both hanging on the Loading Windows Files page at classpnp.sys. I hope this is progress and not degradation.

I gave the former about 3 minutes before interrupting it to try the nest option. I'm going to interrupt the latter now and try VGA, etc just to eliminate the other scenarios.

11
Also, I already have Blue Screen View installed. I think I have the entire Nirsoft suite installed, but never needed to use it for anything serious.

12
Its the same with networking, VGA and all the other safemode options, except the black screen occurs after the driver loading list. I went through every option on the page. Alway the sense that something is happening or there, just overlain with a black screen.

I'll back out of Linux now, unplug the hub and anything else, try all options again and report back soon.

13
No I didn't. I turned it off and unplugged it, as well as my Logitech mouse receiver. I've only just now plugged it in to copy files with Linux to clear the partition I had originally meant to use for the OS drive backup.

I made another attempt post chkdsk to boot prior to inserting and booting off the Linux disk. Still the same - black screen and mouse cursor.

The one time Startup Repair ran without reporting "no errors" it siad there was a "bad driver". I have to wonder since when the Safe Mode drivers load it stops at classpnp.sys (that may be normal for all I know). Once it went one driver further. I looked up the driver and it was a Toolwiz driver. I had a Toolwiz app installed but not one associated with that particular driver, which should not have been loading in safe mode. It may have been a fluke occurence. I ran multiple malware and virus scans earlier this week (5 or 6 different programs, including malwarebytes), before doing TWR. Everything came back clean.

14
The end of the last msg got messed up.

The inability to log in resulted from the TWR crash. At this point the preexisting problem (the browser crashing, which was an irritant) is workable. I'm less concerned with that and would welcome simply being able to get to the point of logging in again. Then I can take care of the obligations and,  ideallly with new hard drive in hand within a few days, work on migrating to th enew drive. I fully accept any risks inherent in doing so.

Right now I'm going to putz around with one of my Linux disks and hope copying the files out doesn't take too much time.

15
From what I've been reading 8kb in bad sectors can be portent of disaster or something that can be monitored. Pretty much everyone says that the second they see hint of deterioration they get a new hard drive and move evrything. A few state that that the fact that chkdsk mentions it means it's been flagged for nonuse and one can continue using the disk in the short term but is taking a risk.

If there's any chance function can be stored to my OS I have to put myself in the latter category.I'd like to confirm that this condition did or didn't exist before if you could point me to prior logs. I've hard restarted so many times in the past few days attempting to login and ahving no other way to shut down or log off when confronted with the black screen with mouse cursor that I have to wonder if that might be cause of some corruption.

I have five external hard disks if varying sizes, plugged into a 10-usb hub. One is a 1TB that I partitioned so that one partition is the size of the internal laptop hard drive, intending to do full image back ups onto it. Right now it has a few 100GB or data I was temporarily storing there. I can't move anything because the hub is not being seen in WinRe but can probably do so in Linux.

Next, even if I copy or image it may be a few days before I can get a new drive. My immediate issue is that I have work hanging and orders to fulfil from days ago. I can copy my data and will try to start pending hearing from you guys, but I have to get this operable and take my chances oending being able to get a new bootable (versus passive portable) drive up and running

16
From X:/Windows/System32
"Eventvwr is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file"

From D:/Windows/System32 get "Error" window:
"The Event Viewer console file X:/windows/system32/eventvwr.msc cannot be found. Re-run Microsoft Windows setup."

Of course, when I run dir for the D drive, eventvwr.exe, eventvwr.msc and EventViewer_EventDetails.xsl are all there.

17
I've just run chkdsk on C (the boot sector). It's clean, with 0 kb in bad sectors and no problems with the file system. The results has the same last line as the othe scan "Failed to transfer...".

18
 Boggin, when I did chkdsk I had changed the prompt to D.  I didn't know better. I'll scan the boot sector separately.

Julian, I've run net users from the D prompt. It shows the same results as from X, unless I'm doing something wrong:

User accounts for // (the slashes actually go the other way)
___________________________________________________
Administrator        Guest          (newly created user)
The command completed with one or more error.

So none of my preexisting users are showing. The same message shows whether I use X, C or D prompt.

19
"Free space verification is complete.
CHJDSK discovered free spqce marked as allocated in the Master File Table (MFT) bitmap.
Correcting errors in the Volume Bitmap.
Windows has made corrections to the file system.

(Then disk space stats, including
... total disk space
... in ... files
817564 kb in 345263 indexes
8 kb in bad sectors
... in use by the system
... occupied by the log file
3995956 kb available on the disk

4096 bytes in each allocation unit
... total allocation units on the disk
... allocation units available on the disk
Failed to transfer logged messages to the event log with status 50.

Sorry for the late reply. I fell asleep waiting for the scan to finish.

The lst line is new. I don't remember that result in orevious scans.

The bad sectors message is new. Now that I see the results I can recall that the previous message was not bad sectors but something about reallocation

20
I,ve read the MBR restore info and it's readable an understandable, but just to clarify --

As far as i can tell the system is booting. Where the logon screen is nothing but black and a mouse cursor. Moving the cursor sometimes.effects the black "brightness". I hear all the normal drive activity as if something is happening, just can't see anything. I've even blindly pushed the button sequence to select my user avatar, enter my password and logon. I hear the activity that is customary to my desktop loading, but still nothing but black and a cursor. I can even bring up the Sticky Keys prompt and the monitor selector in the customary places prior to logon.

By contrast, the true non-boot might be the black screen with the blinking line cursor in the upper left corner. This is defrinitely not that. I see the swirl startup, the goes to black screen where the intro screen and logon would normally come up.
 
Another reason I think the boot may be functional (although not visible) is because from the start Last Known Good Configuration has completed by going to the black / mouse cursor screen. If the boot was broken shouldn't LKGC be presenting a result different than what has already occured?

21
One last thing to mention is that I have permissions set so that users don't have to enter their user name to log on, just their password. Thus the logon windows shows four icons/avatars with user names - Administrator, two Guest accounts (decoys) and my user account (which has admin rights). *If* my user account were corrupted (and I won't be able to confirm until the D: drive scan is over) would that alone be enough to disrupt the logon screen common to all accounts?

I could probably open another cmd windows and work on the MBR (since it's on another partition) but will play itsafe and wait until chkdsk is done, as well as weigh in you thoughts on the scan results and bluescreen log (once I,m told where to find it).

22
Right now I'm seeing nothing about bad sectors. "CHKDSK is verifying file data  (stage 4 of 5), xx percent completed." If a bad sector result was supposed to appear in the previous sections' results I,m clear so far, otherwise the other details don't appear until completion, correct?

I'm saying there were "bad" sectors but it could have been something else, I can't remember the terminology but something not ordinary.

As far as users, I've opened a second cmd window and am being denied access to D: because the scan is running. X: shows Administrator, Guest and the new account I created. However, when logging in to the Recovery environment (remember, the only place I can see the logon), Administrator, Guest, HomeGroup and my regular (preexisting) account all show up in the dropdown. There are others (User, Default, and some system-created .NET related ones) that don,t show up anywhere except in the "Users" folder.

23
It's 6:30PM EST and chkdsk has been running for about 1.5 - 2 hrs. Stage 4, Verifying File Data, has been running about an hour and is at 82percent, having started at 80percent. Judging by past experience it will be done between 10 PM - 2AM. There are about 3.3 million files to process and its currently at about 210 thousand.

No problems reported in the first three stages of the scan, just the usual processing. If it'll save time I can look up results of the last chkdsk, done Monday or so, if told where to find the file.

24
I'm going to run chkdsk now. I know there are bad sectors, 16 or so. I think the data is not in there. I ran two chkdisks the past week, once on my own and once prompted by some other maintenance program. Everything has been happening too quickly to get another drive and move everything.

They take a long time for me - 1TB drive usually at least 90 full, and therecent sector problem equals about 16 - 18 hours. I'm hoping it'll be faster than usual if nothing gets in the way of my running it.

25
Adding a user triggered the message:

"The user or group account specified cannot be found.
The user was successfully created but could not be added to the USERS local group.
More help is available...."

Adding an administrator (I used the same name as above) returned "5he command completed successfully."

I wasn't sure if the first task was to be checking for *my* account. I'm guessing it would say the user already exists if it hasn't been corrupted. And if that were confirmed, then add me as an admin? My main account is assigned admin priveleges, then there is Administrator and acouple of decoy Guest accounts for theft tracking apps.

Let me know if I need to do the tasks using my current user name.

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