Life Is Something Like That

If you have had hard shutdowns on your computer a number of times, or improper shutdowns (e.g. due to power breakdown), or you simply have never done a check of your hard drive, perhaps you would want to run a scan of your disk and fix/repair it, before you start losing data or even the entire drive. I hadn't done a disk check since a few months back, and who would've known, I had a corrupted file (a pretty large one at that) and it's lost. Luckily though, I had a backup of the file. So, it's better for you to make frequent backups of your important data (e.g. to an external hard drive) and to check your disk for errors, perhaps once every few months. Better be safe than sorry. Here's how.

A disk check scans for file system errors as well as check the disk surface for bad sectors. How to check your disk? In Windows there is a Check Disk feature built into every version. In Unix, a similar method is the fsck command. We'll be looking at some of the ways to perform a disk check in Windows 7 (similar in other versions).

1. via GUI: Windows

Go to Computer from your Start menu > right-click on the drive that you want to check (e.g. Drive C) > select the Tools tab > under Error-checking, select "Check now..."

In the next pop-up that shows, you can select both options for a deep check or just the first one for a quick check.

A note though: the Check Disk feature will not work on a drive that is in use, such as your system drive or a drive on which you were performing copy paste operations. You will have to end or complete the operations first. As for the system drive, usually designated the C Drive, Windows will issue a prompt asking if you want to schedule a disk check on the next startup. If you choose to schedule the disk check, on the next startup, a black screen with a prompt will ask you if you would like to continue with the disk check. Just let it run. Or if you suddenly remember that you had an urgent task to do, just hit the Esc key and your computer will boot like normal. A full disk check may take quite some time, depending on the size of your drive and the number of files in it, so be sure that you're really not going to need to use it within the next few hours.

2. via GUI: Software

There are a number of programs which can help you to perform a disk check. One such is CheckDisk.

Select the partition(s) that you want to scan and choose the switches, commonly the (/F) switch. Next, just click "Start", and it will start running the scan. In addition, you can select the option to rescan until no error is produced. Often times, when the scan encounters the first error, it repairs it and stops. Hence, subsequent errors may not have been fixed. So, the option to rescan is good to really do a full check and repair. Also, for scanning the system partition, you can schedule a scan on the next reboot easily by clicking "Scan Selected on Next Boot". You can also see the log of the scan in the "Last Chkdsk Results" window.

3. via Command Prompt

Open the Start Menu > type "cmd" > in the list that appears, right-click on "cmd.exe" and select "Run as administrator"

In the command prompt, type the command to check your disk. Assuming you want to check Drive C, the most commonly used command is:
CHKDSK C: /F /R

The general command is:
CHKDSK [drive letter]: [switches]
where you substitute the drive letter with that of the drive that you want to check, e.g. C or D (without the square brackets). The switches which you can use are as follows:

  /F              Fixes errors on the disk.
  /V              On FAT/FAT32: Displays the full path and name of every file
                  on the disk.
                  On NTFS: Displays cleanup messages if any.
  /R              Locates bad sectors and recovers readable information
                  (implies /F).
  /L:size         NTFS only:  Changes the log file size to the specified number
                  of kilobytes.  If size is not specified, displays current
                  size.
  /X              Forces the volume to dismount first if necessary.
                  All opened handles to the volume would then be invalid
                  (implies /F).
  /I              NTFS only: Performs a less vigorous check of index entries.
  /C              NTFS only: Skips checking of cycles within the folder
                  structure.
  /B              NTFS only: Re-evaluates bad clusters on the volume
                  (implies /R)

Tweet