[Glenn9999]

I had another experience regarding poor support of disk checking in Windows XP. Anyway, once upon a time I had a hard drive fail and the disk check option didn't show anything while I was losing files right and left with errors abound, while the disk check would merrily go on with nothing to report. Now, I had a floppy disk with unreadable files and the disk check in XP did nothing. Thankfully, I had my brand new Windows ME VM, so I booted there and ran the Scandisk there and it fixed it right up (the LFNs got trashed on three of the files).

So do most people do this kind of thing (or similar, like a DOS boot disk?) when it comes to disk checks, or is there something I'm missing that's wrong with XP (a patch or something) that would make this function actually work properly? I would think these days that a properly working chkdsk would be an expectation. Or not?

[Tripredacus]

I've seen CHKDSK actually destroy hard drives.

[Glenn9999]

Tripredacus, on Feb 4 2009, 01:09 PM, said:

I've seen CHKDSK actually destroy hard drives.

I think it may have hastened the hard drive's departure (the one I referred to in the original post). I used the hard drive diag from the manufacturer to test sectors for readability amongst other things and it registered there was a problem.

Anyhow with a NTFS partition, what is a suitable tool to do this job (assuming good drive but corrupted data structure) that is effective and won't hose the drive? Or is it just hope and pray with such things? At least with a FAT32 partition, you could load a physical boot disk and run SCANDISK or NDD there, but can't exactly do that with NTFS...

[Tripredacus]

The safest way to run CHKDSK is via the Recovery Console, or boot to a Win PE of some sort and run it there. I believe you use CHKDSK /R for those cases, it will repair the file system if it can. The Full Scans are more known for destroying drives.