C:\\$Secure is corrupt

[sparkeh]

I have a machine that displays the following error on startup along with virtual memory issues:

 

xcopy.exe

The file or directory C:\\$Secure is corrupt and unreadable. Please run the Chkdsk utility.

 

Chkdsk dosen't cure it and so far Google has told me that $Secure holds a database of the drive security settings and if that goes wrong you are screwed and needs a reimaging.

 

Is this true or this there something else I can do?

[srochford]

How important is the machine and how quickly could you reimage it? If you can reimage it easily then that's likely to be the simplest fix.

 

I suspect that if you could delete all the security settings you could then reset them to defaults (How do I restore security settings to the default settings? tells you how) but I don't know what happens if you try to delete that folder and hope a secedit fix will put it back.

 

You can't easily convert back to FAT32 (there are 3rd party utils which will do it but I've never used them). You could use imagex to back it up to a WIM file and then restore it to a new FAT32 volume (imagex does keep the permissions but I think it will write files back to a different format partition). You then convert that to NTFS and reset perms.

[sparkeh]

How important is the machine and how quickly could you reimage it? If you can reimage it easily then that's likely to be the simplest fix.

 

Its a teaching machine and can be substituted for a while do I suspect you are correct and the reimage would be best.