Strange NTFS Problems
Recently, I have experienced some strange problems with my programs that reside on my NTFS partition (Windows Vista is in ‘charge’ of this partition). It all started when I tried to install Vista SP1 Release Candidate a few months back. The installer would would say “!!! 0xcc2321 WINMAIL.EXE !!!” or something like that. I had no clue what this was referring to. Luckily, I had just created a full system backup a few hours prior to this error. I restored my full backup and I decided to wait for the final release of Service Pack 1. So, I chalked one up to Microsoft’s expert programming.
Well, when Vista SP1 was released, I installed it and received the exact same error (some months later). So, I searched high and low on the internet and finally I found an answer. It so happens that all of my problems stemmed from the fact that Winmail.exe was not properly indexed by the NTFS partition. It turns out that a lot of other people had this problem with various files that were corrupt or not properly indexed by the NTFS partition. Why couldn’t Microsoft program a simple check into the Service Pack 1 installer instead of hanging every system with a single corrupt file? They should know that their file system always breaks itself. At any rate, I ran a chkdsk off of my Vista install disc.
Oddly enough, I still received the error. Another 3 chkdsks later and chkdsk was still reporting that it was fixing the same files over and over again! What happened here? Is my hard drive going bad? I haven’t noticed any of the typical signs of hard drive failure… I eventually just deleted winmail.exe and a couple of other files that were corrupt (9 out of 11 were in that same folder and the other 2 belonged to Windows Media Player). It turns out that this solved all of my problems. Strange. Service Pack 1 just copied the files off of its stores of files and everything worked fine.
A few days after that, Microsoft Office started to crash a lot, especially when I closed it. It would crash after the main window has closed, so I would never lose any work and I didn’t have time to bother checking into it. I eventually received a dialog box from “Microsoft Office Diagnostics” telling me that Word and Powerpoint have crashed frequently (OneNote never crashes). It asked me to check for errors with my installation, so I did. Nothing turned up. I suppose I’ll have to eventually give in and reinstall Office.
Two days ago, I shut my computer down properly. I started it back up and I received a plethora of error messages coming from acrobat.exe. Then randomly, Adobe Acrobat installer would start, shoot out errors, then kill itself, and finally restart itself again. It went into a never-ending loop of trying to repair Acrobat. Ugh. Here we go again. So at the next opportunity I had, I grabbed my Vista install disc and ran a chkdsk. It turns out that 81, yes, eighty-one files in the Adobe Creative Suite 3 folder were corrupt. This time, chkdsk corrected all of my problems and things are running smoothly again.
Does NTFS hate my folders? I use Photoshop CS3 daily and I always shut it down correctly. In fact, it has never crashed on me. Not once. I had an odd problem once Photoshop was repaired, however. Photoshop was stuck on the hand tool… permanently. No matter what I did, Photoshop would simply not change to any tool but the hand tool. Finally, I found a blog through Google that told me to go to “Edit -> Preferences -> General -> Reset All Warning Dialogs.” Sounds like an odd thing to do to fix a problem that has nothing to do with dialogs, but it worked. Strange…
I wonder what’s going on…