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Within Windows 7, CHKDSK detects C: drive as raw (unrecognized)
Would appreciate any advice on this problem, it has me stumped. I have a machine that ran XP Pro 32-bit flawlessly for several years. I upgraded to Windows 7 Pro 64-bit, by wiping the system drive and doing a clean install. Setup created a system reserved partition (c: ) and the Win7 install partition (g: as the machine has several drives with multiple partitions). If I boot to the recovery environment, chkdsk sees these drive letters and does not detect any errors on them.
The machine will boot normally into Windows 7, and it does the required substitution so that the system reserved partition has no drive letter, and the Win7 install partition becomes c:. But if I run chkdsk c: from an elevated command prompt, it reports that drive c: is a raw partition (unrecognized). Yet the machine is running with c: as the Win7 install disk, and I can access it without problems. The issues that occur are as follows:
1. chkdsk c: from within Win7 reports the partition as raw, but this takes a long time and the computer becomes unresponsive while chkdsk runs, returning to normal after chkdsk reports raw status.
2. the disk management console takes a very long time to load the disk information, but does eventually report it correctly, showing c: as the Win7 install drive, as well as the system reserved partition with no drive letter. All volumes are reported as healthy.
3. if I boot to safe mode, chkdsk c: does correctly detect the Win7 install drive and reports NTFS, also no problems on that drive.
4. if I try to do an in-place upgrade of Win 7 (as a repair install), the machine becomes slower and slower and eventually does a BSOD with error code 7a.
5. about twice a month, the machine running normally under Win7 will reboot after a BSOD error code 7a. This seems to happen after instances of extensive system disk use (Windows updates, etc).
So I'm guessing this is either a driver issue or an incorrect registry entry. The only unusual thing about this machine is it uses an Adaptec 29320 SCSI controller and Seagate SCSI hard disks. I've checked out the controller diagnostics and it reports both the controller and disks as ok.
Any thoughts?