Check Your Hard Disk For Errors

Check Your Hard Disk For Errors

Now and again, it is a good practice to test your exhausting drive (laborious disk) for errors using a instrument inbuilt to Home windows XP/Vista/7 known as CHKDSK (for Check Disk).

How do onerous disk errors happen? Apart from the CD/DVD drive in your PC or laptop computer, the laborious disk is the one element with transferring parts, spinning at speeds up to 7200 revolutions per minute whether you're doing something in your pc or not. Resulting from this alone, put on & tear takes place and file errors or even unhealthy sectors on the physical disk itself can occur. Energy surges, bumping or dropping the PC (particularly laptops) can cause errors as well.

What can CHKDSK do? It may well look for cluster errors in addition to file problems. Usually, you might not realize that your laborious disk has an error till you run CHKDSK or another program. As an illustration, I did not know that my laptop's onerous disk had an error till I tried to create a disk picture with Acronis True Image. It warned me that the drive had errors that needed to be fixed before image creation could take place.

Let's run CHKDSK. There are actually two ways to do this, a graphical and a command-line version. To run the graphical version, click on Start>Computer and proper-click on the drive to check (often C:) then click Properties. Go to the Tools tab. Click on the Examine Now button.

In the window that appears, two options can be found:

1. Routinely Repair File System Errors (checked by default), and

2. Scan for and try recovery of unhealthy sectors

For the first time, go away box containers unchecked and click Begin and wait for a report. Click on the Details arrow to get the total report.

If no errors are found, that's nice! If however, errors had been discovered, then re-run CHKDSK with 'Routinely fix file system errors' checked. Note that if you happen to try and run this in your Windows partition, it should let you know that the file system is in use, and do you wish to verify for errors the following time you start your laptop? Click on 'Schedule disk test' after which the subsequent time you restart your PC the CHKDSK utility will run before Windows starts up. When it finishes, it would display an onscreen report.

As for the 2 choice above, this will trigger CHKDSK to carry out a sector-by-sector surface test of the arduous disk, which can take some time. If Examine Disk finds a bad sector, it automatically attempts to recuperate any info stored within the sector and it marks the sector as faulty in order that no data could be saved there in the future. That is what occurred with my arduous disk; there's a 4KB 'dangerous sector' that Windows avoids using, so I can use tools like Acronis True Image with no problems.

Take a look at CHKDSK quickly and preserve your knowledge protected from errors.