Windows unable to write to disk during chkdsk and office saves

Question

Windows is failing to write out to disk for the following events.

• During a chkdsk operation, it's screaming that there is no disk space available to correctly write the fix operations it just performed, yet there's over 60gigs of room.
• Microsoft Office is unable to update certain documents in the same session (I had to create several copies of one file because it kept failing for a read/write permissions issue)
• I was unable to install an application from executing the self-installer because it could not extract the files to any directory.

There are no other issues beyond this. Any suggestions on tools or ways to further investigate? I tried looking at the event viewer, but didn't find anything relating to my problems.

Thanks!

SPECS: WINDOWS XP 2009 SP3 (NTFS)

Answer 1

I would try to boot into the recovery console from your XP media and run chkdsk /r from there. Important to use the /r switch to also check for hardware defects. If it's still yelling at you then your filesystem is likely beyond repair.

I would also check the HDD status using a tool that can read S.M.A.R.T data

If it's a brand name computer you have they often have some sort of diagnostic utility that you can run to verify that HDD. These are often found on the recovery partition or on the media you got with your computer.