Tech Files
'Invalid Media Type' Error
One of the more amusing troubleshooting exercises (okay, amusing to me, especially on my more sadistic teaching days) I put my A+ students through comes after lunch a couple of days into the course. They have systems built up and nicely configured; a few of the advanced students have games installed and are racing or smacking digital monsters during break time.
While they wander off to the lunch room on that fateful day, I gleefully slither around carrying my favorite copy of DrivePro and trash their partitions. On half of the systems, I add a new partition but no formatting. On the other half, I leave the drives naked, with no partitions at all.
Imagine the result when they return from lunch – it's beautiful. Carefree students, stomachs full and minds re-emptied, are transformed into frantic bug-eyed students, exclaiming, "Hey! What happened to my system?!!"I, naturally, put on a face of surprised innocence and suggest they boot to a startup disk and find out what's up.
They quickly reboot and I get to watch their faces change after they type the fateful command:
C:\>FDISK /STATUS
Half the class immediately complains that I destroyed their partitions, but the other half sees their partitions seemingly intact. But if the partitions are intact, what could be wrong with their systems?
"What's an 'Invalid Media Type'?" someone invariably asks after trying to access the C: drive. I throw my hands up into the air and laugh maniacally. Then I show a little mercy (hey, gotta keep ‘em guessing) and explain what has happened.
The Invalid Media Type error message appears in one of three situations, all of which deal with formatting. Most commonly, the error appears when you try to access a disk that has a partition but no FAT, especially after lunch on day 3 in class with a sneaky instructor.
In real world settings, you'll get an Invalid Media Type error when the file allocation table becomes corrupted for some reason, like an electrical surge, proximity to a magnetic or electrical field, or a virus. Even if the system has a valid FAT, you can get the Invalid Media Type error message if you try to access a corrupted file.
Finally, in rare cases bad sectors on a hard drive can cause the operating system to generate an Invalid Media Type error during a format operation. More commonly, however, this problem will generate the message: Trying to recover lost allocation units.
The Moral of the Story
Take your instructor to lunch with you!
- Scott Jernigan