Very Odd Problems - Anyone Ever Encounter Before??

System Spec
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AMD TBird 800 w/ 300+ PC100 RAM
2 Hard Drives
Dual Boot w/ Win98 & WinXP Pro

Hard Drive #1 w/ Partitions of C: D: & E:
C: Win98 only / FAT32
D: WinXP only / FAT32
E: Data (my main workspace) / FAT32

Hard Drive #2 w/ Partitions of F: & G:
F: & G: - Data (not enough to capture to) / FAT32

Problem
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1) I Defrag in XP with Diskeeper 7. Preparing to capture video. I set Diskeeper to Defrag all drives so I don't have to be there but it crashes. Sometimes this happened in the past when I've done a lot of data moving, deleting, creating on my E: partition.

2) I reboot and Defrag again, but one drive at a time. No crash. Everything nice.

3) I reboot to Win98 to capture 4hrs. of video (capturing program AVI_IO does not work for me in WinXP)

4) I go into WinXP and edit the video. Before getting into XP it wants to check my E: partition for errors. If I let it it crashes at 0%. Reset & Power switches don't function for some reason after crash and I have to unplug it. If I bypass the disk checking it boots to XP and everything runs fine. This problem is still happening.

(back to the main problem)...Once I get into XP, I find that only 2hrs. works, the rest got [-peep-] somehow. The VHS tape was fine.

5) I delete the files and defrag again in XP for another 4 hrs. of capturing.

6) Reboot to Win98 for next capturing session but capturing fails around the 2hr. 13min. mark because of low HD space.

7) Win 98 says I only have 2GB left.

8) I reboot to XP and edit the video. It says I have 15GB left

9) After editing I delete the files in XP. XP now says I have 22GB

10) I reboot into Win98 to see if it reads my free space on the E: partition correctly now. It does not. It still says I have 2GB free when I really have 22GB free.


So that's the process I went through. I have no idea why that disk checking thing all of a sudden started happening. And worst of all I have no idea why Win98 is not reading the correct amount of free space on my E: partition when WinXP Pro does. I've captured a ton of tapes using this method and this has never happened before.

The only thing I can think of doing is using PartitionMagic and formatting the E: partition on Drive 1. If that doesn't work I can only think to format the entire Drive #1 and re-partition it and re-install Win98 & WinXP Pro. If THAT doesn't work I can only think of buying a new HD because this one is failing.

Just wondering if anyone out there has any insight into this. Maybe I overlooked something. Maybe this is a glaring example of immenent drive failure? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Driver problem? I would think that would cause problems immediately. With my problems, I've been doing this process for a long time...since I installed XP Pro when it came out. So I don't understand why this....WAIT! I just realized that right before all of this I installed the new Detonator drivers earlier this week.

However I don't think that's the cause either. I installed it in XP, not 98. And it's 98 that is not seeing all of the free disk space I really have available.

I thought about this all day and think my first try at a solution is to reformat the C: partition and reinstall Win98. Maybe that will *fix* 98 and let it see ALL of my free HD space.