Mysterious hard drive problem

[Peter Goertzen]

Howdy folks,

It's good to be back on the list after a temporary
leave of absense for a long emailless vacation. I
hadn't gotten  around to re-subscribing until now,
when a weird problem forces me to seek HELP. I
apologize in advance for the long story, but there are
many parts to this saga and I'm not sure which are
relevant and which ain't. 

My Duo 2300c (44 MB RAM, 750 MB hard drive, System
7.5.5, Ultra Dock 16sce) had been running a bit
sluggishly, so I decided it was time for a disk defrag
and a desktop rebuild (which I hadn't done in over a
year). I started by booting from a Norton Utilities
version 3.5 CD-ROM and running Norton Disk Doctor.
About halfway through the test, the program just kinda
stopped. It didn't freeze or anything, but the cursor
just kept spinning and the progress bar went nowhere.
I restarted and tried again. This time it worked fine.
I went on to running Norton Speed Disk for the defrag,
which was also uneventful (the disk was indeed heavily
fragmented until now, by the way). To double check
everything, I ran Disk First Aid. The disk was fine.
Next, I attempted to rebuild the desktop, and trouble
ensued once more. After the dialogue box appeared
asking if I was sure I wanted to rebuild the desktop
(or whatever it says), the computer froze up and the
external monitor, connected via the Ultra Dock,
suddenly went haywire, displaying only wavy lines and
static. I hit the reset button, removed the Duo from
the Ultra Dock, and tried rebuilding again. This time
it worked. I shut the Duo down, plugged it back into
the Ultra Dock, and, after fiddling with the monitor
settings and restarting, which I always have to do
when I use the external monitor for the first time
after some sort of reset, I ran Norton's System Info
program. Right at the end of the program, as it was
displaying the test summmary, the computer froze up
again. *sigh* Restart. Note: I ran Disk Doctor and
Speed Disk off of the CD, and System Info off of the
hard drive. Not having learned my lesson, I noticed
that I did not have Norton's Disk Light and Fast Find
utilities on my hard drive, and that Norton File
Saver, which I have run extensively in the past
without problems and with a few benefits, was turned
off. I got all of that stuff going. 

Now here's my problem: after all of that, I noticed
that according to the disk info in the window headers,
where I was used to seeing the news that I had about
500 MB in disk and 250 MB free, I suddenly had 769.9
MB in disk and about 900 k free! On my 750 MB hard
drive! I added up the numbers from the get info boxes
for each main folder in my hard drive, and the sum was
about 500 MB. I tried copying a full floppy disk to
the hard drive; not enough memory, it said. I ran Disk
First Aid twice. "Disk appears OK." I rebooted from
the Norton CD and ran Disk Doctor again--no major
problems, just a installation read me file with a bad
date or something.  I rebooted from the hard drive
again and noticed something which may incriminate the
Norton CD in all of this: according to the header
info, I still had 769.9 MB in disk, but only 463 k
free instead of 900 k! Other than that, the computer
is running perfectly well, and is even noticably
faster since the defrag/desktop rebuild. 

I booted from the Norton CD at least three times
today; could it have done something weird to the disk
each time? I have booted from this same CD on this
same Duo several times before with no problems that I
recall. In any case, what on earth is going on and
what on earth can I do about it? Any suggestions will
be greatly appreciated!

-Peter

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