Can't chkdsk

kazakore · 23 Jan 2009 at 18:42

Trying to sort out a problem with one of the Avid machines at work and thought first step would be to run a check disk and then defrag it as Windows can be known to get a bit clunky.

System uses XP and I am trying to run chkdsk through the tools tab in the properties of the drive. The expected do you want to error check after next restart message comes up so I restart the machines. On restarting the blue chkdsk screen appears for about 10 seconds with a message saying it has failed because it "can not open device for direct access." I have never seen this before. Has anybody got any idea what this means or what may be causing it?

slowrunner · 23 Jan 2009 at 20:22

Used to get this on my old rig quite a bit, usually worked fine after a disk clean-up for me.

kazakore · 23 Jan 2009 at 20:38

Ran disk cleanup first but didn't want to get rid of Temp files as Avid isn't closing properly. Thought it may be due to not enough space left for it to work so I manually deleted a lot of the Temp files, gaining 11GB free space (from 800MB on a 60GB drive) and it still didn't run.

Currently doing a defrag which will hopefully help a bit.

Looking at the Temp files I think the issue is caused by the fact that Avid generates a video file for playing current project and stores it in Temp. This isn't being deleted on closure (and Avid is failing to shut properly at the moment.) Hopefully it will be OK for a while but I have a feeling it will just clog up again. It also doesn't explain why it doesn't want to chkdsk...

PMWD · 23 Jan 2009 at 20:42

Have you got the windows disk handy? You could do a repair and run it at the prompt perhaps?

kazakore · 23 Jan 2009 at 21:02

That would mean dealing with the IS department

(and why do they call themselves IS when everybody else in the world uses either IT or IS&T? Grrr!)

90 or more percent sure the main problems are there was no space for the temp file Avid needs so think the steps I've taken should free it up for a little while. I'll find out when back on shift next Tuesday. If it's still not shutting down properly it will just get to this state very quickly again though and I'll have to contact Root6, who officially support the system (although they've been in today to do a RAID repair on the other system which is at 50% after 10 hours...)

yashiro · 23 Jan 2009 at 21:03

Open a command prompt.
Do chkdsk /R. Say yes.
Reboot.
Take the day off.

kazakore · 23 Jan 2009 at 22:20

I'll try this is the system is reported as still having issues when I'm next in.

Known issues

Sometimes the check after CHKDSK invoked with the /f or /r option on reboot still fails, giving the error "Cannot open volume for direct access" on startup, due to an application (anti-virus, anti-spyware, firewall, and the like) that locks up the partition before CHKDSK can access it. This has been improved in Windows XP Service Pack 2, but still happens occasionally. One fix is to set the /SAFEBOOT option in the boot.ini tab after running msconfig.[1] This puts the system in a minimal/low-resolution mode.