any idea whats happening?

[Ralph Cohen]

On Fri, 19 May 2000 09:32:13 -0700 (PDT), Don Morse wrote:

>I'm receiving the following message more and more frequently.  I've yet to recover 
>any of these, and re-indexing simply closes the program.
>
>*******************************************************************
>PMMail/2 could not open the file:
>DMORSE0.ACT\INBOX.FLD\Closin0.FLD\FURXOU0.MSG.
>
>It is possible that the file still exists and PMMail/2
>has just lost track of it.  If you wish, re-index the folder
>and then try to utilize the message again.
>*******************************************************************
>
>I have 7 profiles I collect mail for, I probably have over 200 folders between the 
>seven accounts with many of the folders containing in excess of 2000 messages.  I 
>receive on average 200-300 messages a day, about 200 of them spam and being 
>deleted as I go through them...  this message doesn't seem to care if the folder 
>contains a little or lot of mail, more random.. would like to know what's up though?
>=

I recently ran into a similar problem on a system and it turned out to
be the gradual failure of the hard drive.  When the problems first
appeared, I ran CHKDSK /F on the partition and it reported a number of
structural problems which it then cleaned up.  That seemed to eliminate
the indexing problems for a while, but they eventually showed up again
and CHKDSK again revealed structural problems.  After going though this
several times over a three month period, one day when attempting to
reindex a folder the partition just stopped responding.  CHKDSK would
fail when run on the partition and none of the HPFS repair/recovery
utilities I tried would fix it.  Fortunately and up-to-date backup and
a new drive solved the problem.

Ralph Cohen

rpcohen@neurotron.com