Checking Your Hard Disk

 

Scandisk for XP

 Have you ever inadvertently switched off the energy to your house computer whilst it had been occupied?  If you have then you might have experienced the blue screen of death to greet you when you switched on your PC.  If you didn't get the blue screen of death you might have had the XP boot options screen; sending your PC into an endlessly appearing boot screen and reboot; the system whatever option at the boot screen you choose for.

Before you start thinking of formatting your pc or re-installing windows have tried the old fashioned scan disk control?  Well it is no more telephone scan disk any more it is known as check disk and the command to operate it has been shortened to chkdsk followed by either a /f, /p or a /r.

The /f parameter will fix errors without assessing the quantity for poor sectors, whilst the r parameter will repair errors, find bad sectors, and recover readable information.

The /p switch will tell Check Disk to correct the disk even if it is not pronounced as'filthy'.  The dirty flag is increased when the disc isn't properly dismounted- which is what occurs when people pull out USB drives without even using the Safely Remove Hardware tool.

So how to perform this command if windows does not boot and the boot option safe mode with command prompt does not work?

 Find your Windows XP CD, insert it in your computer and boot from the CD.  You might have to enter the bios (configurations ) of your computer if your PC won't boot from the CD drive.   If you cant boot from cd have a look at placing at our document" setting the boot order".

Assuming that you can boot from the CD the XP setup screen will appear; this is a blue screen that can start off by informing you that setup is inspecting your computer, this is normal.  Once this part is finished you will be presented with a display that has various options.  Press R to repair your computer with the recovery console would be the one which you need to select.

The computer will prompt you for the windows password, if it will enter it in most cases it wont and you will be presented with a screen that for those of you that can remember, seems like an MSDOS screen with an C:\windows 

This is the place where you type in your command, for example;  chkdsk /r   then press enter.

Based on the severity of the problem I have seen this process take any where from 5 minutes to a couple of hours.  Once completed you'll find a concise summary of some issues that it found and the action taken and whether or not the activities were a success.  You will be shown a C:\windows.  Type exit and then press enter.   If there weren't any other problems with your PC it should boot to Windows.

* Note: If your hard disk is making a knocking or clanking sound today is the time to backup your data fast and consider buying a new hard disk drive. 

This helpful article was removed in the UK Computer Solutions web site where I signed up for free file storage.  I as an IT consultant have had several occasions to use the chksdk command.  It really does work.