chkdsk question---it's been running for 24 hours now

I got the blue screen of death yesterday in win 2000 pro and reboot produced an "NTLDR missing" message. My primary HD is 2 120gig sata's in raid-0 for 240gig total. I plugged my backup IDE HD and made sure it booted ok and all my files were there (thank god I backed everything up a couple weeks ago). I then plugged in the sata's to see if I could recover anything. My POST screen shows the raid in good status but after the Windows splash screen, I got a message saying that Windows needed to check my disc for consistency. I didn't have the option to use any switches, chkdsk just started. It went through three stages (file verification, indexes, and security descriptors) and then it said "correcting errors in MBT mirror" and finally "correcting errors in uppercase file". All stages went real fast until this last one and it's been running since 9:30 p.m. last night. I can hear the drives spinning so I think it's doing something, but is this normal for it to take this long?

thanks for any help.

Mostly likely it is stuck at a particular point. It'll keep doing this indefinitely.

The message you are getting probably indicates a corrupt master boot record or at least a corrupt file. You're going to need to re-install or repair your Windoze installation. The drive itself could be damaged.

i'm gonna try to find some good recovery software and see what i can save but i'll bet it's all toast. i just bought those drives a month ago so i hope Crap Buy will exchange them.

thanks.

If there is any data on the disk you need to get and it is just the MBR that is trashed, you can probably set up the drive as a slave or secondary drive, boot from another, and transfer that data to a different disk. You also might be able to get away with a Windows "repair" installation if you have a Windows install disk.

I experienced a problem like this on a drive that was just barely out of warranty. I figured it was toast, so I got a new drive and plugged in the old one to see what I could recover. I got everything off it, then reformatted. It's been running fine as a secondary drive ever since, which is about two years.

Your should still be under warranty, so if you can, it wouldn't be a bad idea to exchange them.

my backup IDE drive that tried to run chkdsk in the first place is setup as a master and sata drives don't have master/slave settings (that i'm aware of) so they default to slave when my ide is in.

I broke the raid this morning and reformatted both. Now the fun starts--dealing with crap buy on a friday and then installing WinME and then 2000, service packs, etc. :argh: