I'm getting this message...

[Michael Best]

on start up opening Vegas

vegas50.exe - Corrupt File

The file or directory H:\Mft is corrupt and unreadable. Please
run the Chkdsk utility.

??? Anybody ever seen this? It will not allow me to start Vegas?

[Edward Troxel]

Can you open Vegas while holding down CTRL-SHIFT?

[Rob Lohman]

Did it read MFT or MFT$ (could be $MFT as well, don't remember)?

MFT is the NTFS' master file table. If that is corrupt you have
a pretty serious problem and chkdsk can resolve that usually.

Sound like your file system is corrupt and some files have gone
corrupt as well. This is not a good thing and the first order of
business should be backing up any important files ASAP.

[Michael Best]

I'll try the CTRL-SHIFT

It does have the $ sign, I omitted it. I'll restart the system
and usually it will run the CHKDSK and work fine. It seems
to work from then on. It doesn't do it every time I start up,
it's a random thing. I just wish I knew what it was, how it
happened, and how to fix it. My search here didn't reveal
anything.

On a side note, I did get the audio to work last night from
the song I imported from a disk. (Had static) Don't know why
it suddenly worked though.

[Rob Lohman]

Again, the MFT is your master file system and you really do not
want that to be corrupted. This is a sign of bad things to come!
Chkdsk will run automatically when it detects problems with your
harddisk (this does NOT indicate that you do NOT have any
problems if it does NOT run!!). So that's why it only runs
sometimes.

You should really not have MFT errors, unless:

1) your windows installation is corrupt

2) a virus could do this in theory

3) your harddisk is breaking down

Where the last option is usually the problem. Again, backup all
your precious data NOW.

How old is this harddisk? What operating system are you running?

[Michael Best]

Dang you're scaring me.....

It's a 160g Western Digital, 8mb cache, purchased just this
past May. Window XP Pro.

[Rob Lohman]

Well then you are probably lucky since you are still under warranty.
And yes, new harddisks can break as well.

It is a good thing that I'm scaring you because file system
corruption is not something to take lightly! Things like this can
also happen if your system freezes or crashes for example.

Just make sure everything important is safe and then closely
monitor your system.

One other thing. In the past I've also seen such things when
two not very compatible IDE devices where on the same IDE
channel. So you might want to make sure your harddisk is just
by itself on the channel as well.

[Michael Best]

That last paragraph is something I need to check.

I'm still lost on what triggers this - see the issue is at the
start up of Vegas which is all on drive E:, the H: drive doesn't
even contain any .exe files? I would have thought the error message would reference E: -- Maybe at start up it scans all drives and is coughing at the glitch on the H: drive. This occurs about once in every 4-5 start-ups which perplexes me, why only sometimes and what is ChkDsk doing that fixes it? Often when
this happens the dialog box in the center of the screen will say
that error may have occurred because your memory is low - close other programs. How could that be? There's all kind's of space
on those disks and no other applications are running, and the
performance window shows minimal memory usage. My only
concern is that some part of Vegas is in the C: drive which is very
low on space but I never put anything there and changed preferences/properties out of the C: drive.

[Rob Lohman]

Low-space can definitely cause problems, so take a look if you can
clean that C drive up and perhaps move things off your desktop
to another drive or so.

Windows is complaining about low MEMORY. That is NOT the same
thing as harddisk space. How much system memory do you have?
Which version of Windows are you running?

If you see the error that often something is pretty wrong some-
where. Chkdsk basically scans the drives and checks all tables
for errors. When it finds those it can usually fix them by itself
(due to the nature of file systems and the way that NTFS keeps
a journal of what it does with files).

What is on this H: drive that is giving you problems?

[Michael Best]

memoery 512mb
windows xp pro

I wish I knew what it was on the H: drive giving me problems.
I guess I don't understand why it only happens sometimes,
it's like - come on computer, do you have issues or don't you?

[Rob Lohman]

It his a seperate drive? How old? What brand? I've had a couple
of failing harddisks over the years and some of them sometimes
worked and other times didn't. Others just died one day.

[Trey Perrone]

i had this error on a set of striped WD 80GBs and it drove me nuts...

i eventually split the set up

one became my new OS drive (replaceing a 40GB WD) and the other became a mp3 wharehouse

i have occassionally had some more errors simliar (not being able to save all data, etc) on that mp3 drive, so i assume it is an issue with the drive ( when i switched it out i moved from a ATA133 card to the actual mobo IDE port, plus reinstall XP to diff drive - pretty much ruling out the ide or OS)

just my two cents, but honestly...I would stay away from WD drives...i was a die hard WD man for the past decade or so...but in the past 3 years or so i have been having increasing errors/ strange issue with WDs and a few failed. notable, WD cut back their warranties from 3 to 1 year not that long ago (4 years maybe?)

Out of the 13-15 HDs in my household, only the last two purchased are not WD (maxtor and hitachi)

now seagate is offering a much larger warranty on there drives (not that anything can replace the value of the data lost, especially when it is a clients prject)

i think they are just not making the kind of quality merchandise they used to...who knows they may end up like the IBM HD division.