My Windows XP computer has two physical hard drives, neither of which are partitioned. Every two months I defragment both drives using Norton’s SystemWorks Disk Doctor. Since April I have been unsuccessful with the defragmentation process. I can defragment the D drive without problem, but when trying to defragment the C drive Norton insists that the drive is scanned using Chkdsk, which reports that everything is OK. However, immediately after using Chkdsk I still cannot get Norton Disk Doctor to defragment the C drive, instead the following message appears: ?Error on hard disk 1 No bootable partition found. The partition table does not contain a valid bootable partition. If you receive the error message “Non system disk or disk error” correct this problem. Do you wish to correct this problem?”. Since I do not receive the error “Non system disk or disk error? I do not instruct Norton to correct the problem. How can I make Norton defragment the hard drive? On a different topic, a while ago when writing a Word document the hard drive made a strange noise and the computer restarted. Windows did not start correctly, and required a few more reboots. However, no other problems have occurred in recent times. Is this anything to be concerned about?

This is a strange error message, and there unfortunately does not seem to be a large amount of information on this particular error. Before going into the specifics of the error message, rest assured that your hard drive does have partitions. Every hard drive must have at least one partition, as data cannot be stored in an unpartitioned hard drive. Therefore, in your case I imagine that on each drive there is one partition which occupies all the free space on the drive. The error message appearing indicates that a bootable partition was not found on the C drive, indicating that no partition containing a bootable operating system (such as Windows) was found on the drive. If this was a real problem, you would not be able to boot into Windows since there would be no bootable operating system on the drive, and you would instead receive a message on boot saying “non system disk or disk error” indicating that the computer cannot find an operating system to boot. Obviously this is not the case, since you can boot into Windows and you are not receiving this error message on startup. You have made the correct decision to not allow Norton to correct the non system disk error, as allowing Norton to “correct” the problem will likely cause further major problems with the computer.

There are two primary reasons that Norton may be producing this error rather than defragmenting the hard drive. First, your computer may have a non-standard configuration where the C drive is not the system (bootable) drive, but instead the D drive is the system drive. On most computer systems the C drive is the de-facto standard for the primary bootable drive in the computer which contains the Windows system. If your computer is instead using the D drive as the primary system drive with Windows, and the C drive is simply a second drive providing additional storage space, Norton may not understand this and complain that the C drive does not have a bootable partition (i.e. there is no operating system installed on this drive). Norton may then be making the false assumption that something has corrupted on the drive, making it unbootable, and thus offering to repair the drive to make it bootable again. Of course, if you agree then Norton will make the C drive bootable (stealing the bootable privileges from the actual D system drive). Since the C drive has no operating system, your computer will no longer boot, creating a major problem. To determine whether this is the case, open Windows Explorer or My Computer and check the C and D drives to determine which drive has the WINDOWS folder. This will tell you which drive is the system bootable drive. If the D drive contains the WINDOWS folder, this tells you that the D drive is the system drive. In this case, it is highly likely that Norton does not understand that the D drive is your system drive rather than the C drive. This could be an error in the software, especially if you are running an old version of Norton SystemWorks. In this scenario, please contact me again for further advice and let me know which version of SystemWorks you are running on the computer.

In the event that the WINDOWS directory is present on the C drive this makes life even more interesting, since it seems that Norton is having trouble realising there is no problem with the C drive, considering the drive is perfectly bootable (as you are using Windows which is booting from the C drive). In this situation, I am unsure why Norton would be producing this message but it could be a fault with Norton rather than the computer, since everything with the computer drives seems to check with no problems, according to the ChkDsk utility.

In either situation, if you are unable to use Norton Disk Doctor to defragment the hard drive then you could try using the Windows XP Disk Defragmentation utility. This will also provide a useful test to determine whether the issue is with the hard drive, or with the defragmentation software. If the Windows XP Disk Defragmenter works correctly, then it seems the issue is with Norton Disk Doctor. On the other hand, if the Windows XP utility does not work or suffers the same symptoms, this could indicate the problem is with the hard drive. To run the Windows XP Disk Defragmenter, open My Computer or Windows Explorer and right-click on the C drive (which is the drive causing issues for Norton Disk Doctor) and select “Properties”. In the window that appears, click the “Tools” tab, then the “Defragment Now” button. The Disk Defragmenter window will appear. Click the “Analyze” button to determine whether the hard drive needs to be defragmented. Following the analysis stage, assuming the Disk Defragmenter notifies you that the disk should be defragmented, click the “Defragment” button. Depending on the outcome of the Disk Defragmenter process, this should provide us with some more useful information on the problem. If you contact me again for further advice on this issue, then please include the results of this experiment.

Regarding your second question about the computer restarting, while I cannot say for certain without further investigations, since nothing untoward has happened subsequent to this computer crash it is unlikely to be anything to worry about. Furthermore, it is similarly unlikely that the defragmentation problem with Norton Disk Doctor is related to this computer crash. Therefore, continue to monitor the computer for any future occurrences, but this should not be cause for concern as it appears to be a one-off error on the computer. However, if this does reoccur then please contact me again for further advice, in case there could be a deeper problem with the computer which needs to be diagnosed and fixed.