avast can't scan corrupted RAR archive.

[thingie]

Hi. I was running a scan today on my external hard drive and Avast stated at the end of the scan that it couldn't scan two RAR archives in the system volume information. It stated that they were corrupt.

I was a tad confused about this, since I'm not really sure what exactly they were. One of the corrupted archives was simply listed as "system volume information\... \" while the other was listed as "system volume information\... \NAVOptrf.dll"

Anyway, I ran the XP disk error checking tool in safe mode on the drive, to have it look for any bad sectors, and it didn't find any. (BTW, does anyone know how to get checkdisk to properly "check for and fix" file problems? Every time I select that option it says that it requires windows files that are in use and that I have to schedule on restart. I thought that meant it would do it automatically when I restarted the machine, but it didn't. So I'm not sure how to get that to work.)

Regardless, I have two concerns. One, what exactly does this mean? And two, should I back up the data on this disk and reformat it to get rid of this corruption? How problematic is a corrupt RAR archive in system volume? Avast doesn't give me the option to repair it.

I'm just wondering if I should be concerned about the health of this hard drive, or if I can have Avast quarantine these or simply blow them away and not worry about it.

[alanrf]

Responding purely on the checkdisk comments ...

Typically in XP you cannot perform a checkdisk scan on your system volume, volume containing your IE tempoarary files, paging file etc etc  ... anything Microsoft considers important.  The system should offer you the option of saying that you would like the disk to be scanned on the next system restart.  Then the restart will be suspended until the scan of the affected disk is complete.

   

[lukor]

Corrupted archive is not something checkdisk should find out. It's probably just a file, that has it's end truncated and can not be unzipped with standard RAR program. Checkdisk will not find this; in a similar way your technician will not correct any spelling errors while he is servicing your printer.

You have probably already deleted it, since it resides in the restore point ("system volume information"). You can clear the restore points by disabling the system restore feature on the drive and then re-enabling it again. You will loose your restore points of course.

Lukas

[thingie]

Thanks. I tried that with re-enabling the restore points and then disabling them again, but I noticed that there were still restore points on that drive, because I saw them when avast was scanning the system volume. I have no idea what that is all about.

[DavidR]

You need to disable system restore on all drives and then reboot for it to clear the system volume information folders.

[thingie]

Hi.

I still have the same problem. There are restore points on several of my non-system drives, despite the fact that I turned restore on, rebooted, then turned restore off, rebooted again, with my external drive on during the reboots. (and the internal non-system disks also still reported having restore points.)

The thing that bothers me is that the paths are not complete in the Avast report. Avast doesn't seem to tell me where these things are in the system volume information folder. It might be in a restore point, it might not.

What I really need to do is somehow get access to this folder to find out what is in there, but when I click on it, it says access is denied. Does anyone know how to get into this folder, and what is safe or not safe to delete?

[DavidR]

1. You have to disable system restore for ALL drives individually, there is no single disable that applies to ALL drives with a system volume information folder, see image.

2. The path is complete, you need to expand the column width, hover the mouse pointer over the column header separator until the pointer changes and drag (left click and hold) to the right see image.

3. You need to change the folder options to show hidden and system folders.