"unknown hard error" message

"-" wrote in message
. ..
I've recently been getting this error message in win 2k during almost
every
third or fourth boot. I've thoroughly scanned the HD and no errors
reported.
Every time I boot, I'm getting a problem either hanging, taking ages,
etc -
unless I boot into win98 and the boot win2k again. I think there is a
problem with the services.exe program because it happened once when I was
trying to manually start a service - but then again why would it say "hard
error". Could that message mean more widely "any" hardware error or does
it
really mean harddrive? I haven't added any new hardware - except perhaps
that I disconnect my plug and play digital camera sometimes without
"removing it safely", but if this was the problem, why would this cause an
error on boot?

It COULD be trying to boot or identify the memory card in your camera as a
valid drive and write the NT signature to it. Probably not, but who knows?

You could run a disk diagnostic, Western Digital and Maxtor have such
utilities on their site.


"-" wrote in message
. ..
I've recently been getting this error message in win 2k during almost
every
third or fourth boot. I've thoroughly scanned the HD and no errors
reported.
Every time I boot, I'm getting a problem either hanging, taking ages,
etc -
unless I boot into win98 and the boot win2k again. I think there is a
problem with the services.exe program because it happened once when I was
trying to manually start a service - but then again why would it say "hard
error". Could that message mean more widely "any" hardware error or does
it
really mean harddrive? I haven't added any new hardware - except perhaps
that I disconnect my plug and play digital camera sometimes without
"removing it safely", but if this was the problem, why would this cause an
error on boot?

You could run a disk diagnostic, Western Digital and Maxtor have such
utilities on their site.

Thanks I did that and tried active smart. It reported that everything was
fine, so I guess that HD failure is not the problem. Today when I looked
into the problem a bit more it seems that my squid proxy server couldn't
start properly as a service. When I tried it from the command line it said
it couldn't recognize my hosts file. I opened it up fine in notepad though.
I rebooted again and everything was fine (squid, etc). So, it seems that
every so often the hosts file seems to get corrupted as its loading windows.
I guess this is the wrong ng to ask why that is though, so cheers for now.