DLL errors

[LeHah]

Ive been the bitch of the Blue Scren Of Death thanks to VDD errors. It took me about 90 minutes worth of rebooting to get this thing to work for fuck's sake.

It's all thanks to Defrag - or so it seems. I defragged my PC while I was at work on Friday and since then, the computer has me eating untold buckets of shit.

This computer breaking would piss me off - but me losing essential files is making me... emotional. Theres a lot on here Id be devestated to lose (Old conversations, pictures, etc) so Im going to try and burn a shitload of CDs while everything seems to be "working".

For those interested in being informed, the errors are from the 4 most basic DDL files you could ever run across: MMSystem.dll, Iphlpapi.dll, Ver.dll, LZExpand.dll. I'm unfamiliar with the fourth one but the other three? Jeez - who did I piss off? I downloaded those famous 3 from EZGoal.com - I'm wondering if I should just place them in my Systems directory and see what happens...

Thoughts?

 

[Worf]

Defrag will do it. If you interrupt it during a vital stage, it can corrupt the drive. Given that most drives will start fragmenting the instant you use them under Windows, I don't defrag very often (FAT is especially bad, but NTFS can be extremely bad because it can force fragmentation that can't be fixed).

Honestly, your best bet is to remove the drive, take it to a friend's place, and get it backed up to CDs or DVDs. Then reformat, reinstall and away you go. Or, get a new hard drive, install Windows onto that, then use the fresh installation to recover and backup the data off the old drive.

You might get away by reinstalling Windows on the same drive though, but if there's any bad corruption, you may still end up where you started, or worse. Best to just get it backed up and reinstalled.

 

[cff]

If you backup your old files and then just copy the new ones in nothing spectacular should happen. And if it does just revert back.

HOWEVER you might have a harware error. In my experience when basic DLLs start to fail I either had a thermic problem or faulty ram. Never a software issue.

PS: Defragmentation is far less risky then what some people think it is. The old data is only erased after the new one is written and verified (at least in good defrag software). Only in the rare case that the virification is good, but the data still bad youc an get an error. A crash while doing defrag should lead to lost clusters, BUT those are of the incomplete copy and should NOT harm you. In any case I never had any problems and I am defragging once a month.

 

[LeHah]

With reservations - I'm going to take Worf's advice and just wipe the slate clean. I've backed up the irreplaceable stuff onto CD/Rs - but the question now is where the shit is my Windows CD?