One of my nightmares over the last couple of years - it happened again yesterday. This was what greeted me when I started my Windows XP yesterday:
"One of your disks needs to be checked for consistency"
This only occurs on the C: drive. Windows will 'fix' this problem alright, via a 'CHKDSK', but always will some files deleted. The only thing I could do is to restore the deleted files from backups; which is a laborious task since Windows doesn't actually tell me the directories/folders the deleted files were from. At the back of my mind, I always have this feeling that one of these days, some essential system file will get messed up real bad rendering my PC unbootable.
Googling didn't help much as I could not find anything specific to this problem.
A Lead?
It's only a hunch, but my suspicion has always been on the Avira Free Antivirus software for it is the only application that modifies my C: drive regularly via its automatic updates. But I have never had any concrete indications ... until yesterday (well, at least I believe it is so).
While poking around the Window Event Viewer logs and Avira Update logs, I stumbled upon something peculiar. If you were to look at the time of occurrence of the reported 'nfts error' and the 'Avira Update' (see the 2 pictures above) you will notice that they appear to 'coincide' (Note: The detailed report for this particular entry in Avira shows that the Anti-virus update process ran for about 1 minute 50 seconds; so this is just about right).
It would be great if I could have more log and report entries to look at but unfortunately I don't. The default configuration for Avira is to keep log entries for 30 days only. As luck would have it, during the last month the file system on the C: drive was quite stable. In prior months, I used to get at least one 'corrupted C: drive error' per month.
A Workaround?
This is just my hypotheses but I suspect memory contention (where I only have 1 GB RAM) is causing this problem.
Previously, I had given Avira the freedom in updating its Antivirus via its own scheduler. The update process will, unfortunately, happen at the most inconvenient time when I have a few applications running in the foreground. This will cause the whole Windows XP to freeze temporarily sometimes.
Assuming that memory contention is the problem, I have now decided to a trigger the Avira Antivirus update myself upon startup (from within the application itself via the F9 key), while not having any application running in the foreground.
I have also set the 'Automatic update' interval to 6 hours instead of 2, the default. The reason being I do not want an auto update while I am using my PC - I usually utilize my PC for no longer than 4 hours at any single time.
Will this help? I do hope so.
0 comments:
Post a Comment