why are all my files cross linked??

[donn]

After installing windows 95 (win 98 had many problems) somewhat successfully, i did a disk check and noticed there were many crosslinked files that needed to be "fixed" i assume this is not normal but what is causing it? Should i reinstall windows or could it be a bad hard drive?

thanks
donn

[Isos]

I would guess that you're FAT was damage somehow. In my experience, if you are overclocking and you see a lot of cross-linked or invalid entries in your FAT, you should re-check with the standard (non-overclocked and see if it has gone away). A not-so-stable system produce this kind of problem. Most noticeably with FSB resulting higher PCI speed.

Another possibility is that your BIOS is not totally compatible with the HD. A while back, I upgraded a Packard Bell from 512MB HD to 2 GB HD. It formatted, loaded Windows 95 and runs for awhile. Then as the HD got filled, I encounter lots of HD related errors. I thought that the HD was bad at first. But when I loaded an updated Harddisk utility that loads a BIOS extension (not Disk Manager but something else-I don't remember) the problem went away. Of course, that's after I reformat the HD again.

[CMonster]

This cross-linked files problem happened to me on two occasions; when running scan disk after resizing and creating a new partition with Partition Magic 3.0 on a FAT32 disk - in which case DO NOT let scan disk "fix" the probelm. It ran fine for weeks until I routienly ran scandisk and defrag - like a fool I let it "fix" the drive - and it kept on finding cross linked files and fixing them(ha ha ha it got fixed all right!); 'twas time to reinstall!

The other time I had some marginal memory running in an overclocked system - after troubleshooting and replacing the memory scandisk behaved itself.

Good luck

[This message has been edited by CMonster (edited 02-22-99).]