explorer.exe keeps crashing

An ATAPI error would center on your optical drives most likely. Sounds to me as though your optical drive is not responding for some reason. Have you checked its status in Device Manager? Does this happen only when you attempt to access files/folders on an optical drive, or does Explorer crash when you use it to look at folders on your hard drive? Is a there a number code included with the error message? It would be helpful also to know your operating system and version.

Thanks for your reply.

Operating System: Windows 2000 Professional
Version: 5.0.2195 Service Pack 4 Build 2195

What do you mean by optical drive? It happens quite a lot when I use my MP3 player and am transferring mp3 files from my hard drive to the removable mp3 drive. Also happens when I d/l music and try to play it when it's incomplete in Winamp. It used to work ok. I can't see any number code..where would I find that? However there is a warning before the error which says in the event viewer:

Type: Warning
Source: Disk
Description: An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk0\DR0 during a paging operation.

If that helps at all? There is an event number, the warning is 51 and the error is 9.

An optical drive would be a CD or DVD drive. However, from the warning info listed in your second post (Warning 51, Error 9), thats probably not where your problem lies. Hate to tell you this, but that could be real bad news ... Looks like what you've got going on there is a sick hard drive. It might be as simple as a few bad sectors, in which case, you might be able to clear things up by going to Command, then typing in (without the quotes) "chkdsk /f /r". You'll probably get an error message that says it can't run because the drive is in use, and you'll be offered the option to run on next boot. That's what you want. Select it and reboot. When the system reboots, "checkdisk - full - repair" should run before Windows loads, attempting to find and repair hard disk drive errors. Depending on the size of your drive, that could take quite a while. When it completes, you'll probably get a message that errors were found, and that they were all fixed(good news ) or were not (bad news ). Let Windows load all the way, but don't do anything in Windows. Reboot into safemode and run defrag. That'll prolly take a good while too, so be prepared to be patient. When defrag completes, instead of exiting, run it again. The second time should go lots quicker. I'd even repeat the entire process, running "chkdsk /f /r" at boot one more time, and running defrag from safemode once more, but that's just me ... I'm not a very trusting soul. Now, reboot normally and see what happens when you duplicate the conditions which brought about your original warning message. Best case: you fixed it, and the problem is gone. Less good: the problem recurs, which would point to a hardware problem; bad drive connector or connection or bad IDE cable, relatively easy-to-fix problems, or bad drive itself ... which, of course, would be the worst case. You might be able to find a downloadable diagnostic for your drive on your drive vendor's website; if so, download it, run it, and see what it says.

All else being equal, I'd be prepared for the worst case. Pessimists are rarely disappointed. That's why backups are important.

If you're real lucky, maybe I'm wrong, and somebody else here will come along and have a better scenario for you. Lets hope so.

Re: explorer.exe keeps crashing


Three words first: Backup! Backup! Backup!

Backed up your hard disk yet? Good. Now, the problem you're seeing could either be a hardware bug in your hard disk, or your processor is generating data faster than your hard disk's controller can write it, causing a traffic jam somewhere on the IDE bus. In the first case, the Checkdisk program will complain about defective sectors on your hard drive, in the second it won't. With this in mind, and knowing you have made a backup (right?) -- what happens when you run Checkdisk by typing 'chkdsk' at the Command Prompt?

Those who are following along might wanna see this Microsoft Knowledge Base Article dealing with considerations pertaining to CHKDSK and DEFRAG in Win2K.