Kind of a long story, so I'll try to abbreviate and keep it as short as possible. System: MacBook Pro w/ OS X 10.5.5. Windows XP SP3, Parallels migrations from 3 to 4. Configured to boot with OS X or XP via boot camp. I'm an engineer - very Windows XP literate (including support and maintenance beyond most users), but relatively new to OS X. This Mac is for work. We have an IT department, but they let me have administrator access, and I do most maintenance myself. So here's what I've experienced: 1) Macbook had been working fine under Parallels 3.0 (can't recall what version, but I kept it up to date) 2) Week of Dec. 8th, IT upgraded from Parallels 3.0 to 4.0. Things seemed fine as far as I could tell at that point. Running XP from OS X via VM. 3) Shut down XP, Parallels, and OS X to take laptop home on the 12th. 3 weeks of year-end vacation and holiday time, but was planning some work from home. 4) Restarted OS X and XP from home weekend of the 13th/14th. At completion of XP boot, I was warned that the hard drive had an error and to run chkdsk /f. 5) Ran chkdsk, found many errors. Chkdsk repaired them, I rebooted, and things seemed fine. 6) Used laptop on and off for the three weeks of vacation without reboots. 7) During shutdown before going back to work, Cisco VPN on the OS X side wouldn't close properly. But actually it really hadn't been running that much during the whole three weeks because I used the VPN on my home desktop to network into the office. 8) But the weird shut down made me decide to reboot into OS X and XP since I'd had the previous problems. OS X rebooted fine. Launching the XP VM, though, gave me BSOD. I could read it as it cycled back to boot, and it said it was missing LZ32.dll. So I loaded LZ32.dll on my memory stick from my desktop (XP SP3 also), and put it on the NTFS partition and booted XP. BSOD again, this time Olesrv32.dll. Replaced it. BSOD with olethk32.dll. Replaced it, and this time XP launch just hung. In this whole process, if I rebooted straight to XP via boot camp, same symptoms. 9) Reinstalled XP SP3 over the top of the NTFS partition via CD. Went smoothly. Booted to XP. Ran sfc /scannow just to be sure. Things seemed fine. Shut down and got ready for starting work on Monday this past week. 10) Monday working in XP, Norton AV gave me a message it wasn't working properly. I asked IT to reinstall Norton AV. During that uninstall/re-install, they said NAV said there was a disk problem and said to run chkdsk /f. Did it, more errors, chkdsk /f repaired, NAV reinstalled. HOWEVER, a day later I had the same NAV not running error. Chkdsk /f found more errors. 11) Thursday I ran TWO full chkdsk /R (sector-by-sector) repairs on the NTFS partition. To my surprise, NO - ZERO -ZILCH bad sectors were found. Chkdsk still reports "0 KB in bad sectors." 12) Friday, rebooted to OS X, installed Parallels 4, version 3810 - this did clean up a trackball problem I had where I'd mentioned the disk problems but also trackball problem. 12) Worked Friday, ran chkdsk many times (in both non-repair mode and full repair mode) during the day after various restarts/reboots. Some to XP via boot camp, some to OS X, then parallels to XP via VM. ALL DAY LONG chkdsk reported errors. I capture all in the cmd windows in non-repair mode and saved them on my NTFS partition - see 13 below. 13) Brought the laptop home to work over the weekend, back it up again, and put together a zip file of all the chkdsk errors (for whatever reason I haven't tracked down, I haven't been getting bootex.log files, but I have captured some of the chkdsk non-repair runs from a cmd window, pasted them into Notepad, and saved the files), with the plan to zip them and send them in. However, on reboot this morning, chkdsk yet again had errors, and I ran it in /f mode after reboot. In the clean up, I saw some MFT errors (oh-no), and the last error was the 2nd block of the boot sector could not be written. I knew I was in trouble. 14) Now I can't boot to XP from VM or boot camp. BSOD. OS X does run, and the disk utility says the OS X partition is fine. I tried to reinstall XP from CD, but there are now the following partitions are XP install screen E: Partition 1 [Unknown] 200MB (200MB free) D: Partition 2 [Unknown] 66432MB (66432MB free) Unpartitioned space 128MB C: Partition 3 [Unknown] 124022MB (124022MB free) OS X disk utility reports the hard drive with proper OS X extended partition (and verified OK), 64.9GB (32.1GB used, 32.8GB free), but the NTFS partition now is "Disk0s3" (was Mac127PC). It reports 0 folders, 142,961 files , 121GB capacity, 53.6GB used, 67.5GB free (at least something's still being recognized here). Needless to say I'm scared that the whole NTFS partition is unrepairable, --- and I don't have backups of Friday. (Wednesday was my last back up, and it crashed in the middle of running). Here's a preliminary conclusion, though, for the Parallels folks on this forum. Since two runs of chkdsk /r haven't found bad sectors, since almost any boot cycle seems to corrupt the disk, and since 4.0 was installed just prior to all this happening, my suspicion is something in my system and parallels 4.0 is not happy. BTW, one other symptom. When I was backing up on Wednesday, and trying to work at the same time, CPU and memory were maxed out (I have iStat Pro widget on the Mac side). MANY, MANY keystrokes were ignored (not just delayed reaction, but apparently lost). Yesterday, even when I wasn't backing up and the system seemed somewhat normal, I believe there were still occasional keystrokes lost. Yesterday's is a perception, because it didn't happen often, and maybe I just didn't hit the key hard enough? But it was OBVIOUS over and over on Wednesday that keystrokes were completely lost before they made it to MS Word in XP. Anyway, sorry again for the long post. Any help would be appreciated. I have a version of Norton Partition Magic 8.0. That's my next step as far as I can think. But any suggestions will, I'm sure, help unwind and find the cause of all this hard drive grief. Thanks in advance!!!
Just another update... Good new, bad news. Tried Partition Magic. Boots, but doesn't find any hard drives on the MacBook Pro. Dead end there. Tried Windows XP over-the-top install on C: mentioned above. The XP CD looks at that partition and sad it needs formatted, and to hit enter to continue and to format the drive. Stopped there. Booting to OS X, and looking at the NTFS drive with the finder, it *does* find files and I can browse my NTFS partition. So I just started the process of copying my Documents and Settings folder from the NTFS partition to an external NTFS drive. So far, so good. 45 minutes more to go. If I can get a snapshot of what I did yesterday, I will feel much better (biggest thing is the Outlook pst files). Reinstall of XP and applications after that is relatively trivial. Of course, then there's understanding why it's happening.
