Hard Disk – Impending Doom
I had a couple of innocent notes in doing whole disk backup copies of my computers hard disk. I use Casper XP (which sometime I must write about because it’s rather good) and it was not able to copy all the info in some outlook archive files… which is a bit worrying. Casper Tech Support asked for some dumps and then said I needed to run chkdsk because it looked like my hard disk has a problem…
1) Open My Computer and select Lauren C drive (C:)
2) On the File menu, click Properties.
3) Click the Tools tab.
4) In the Error-checking box, click Check Now.
5) In Check disk options, check the Automatically fix file system errors and Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors check boxes.
6) Click Start.
It actually runs next time you boot and it takes a long time – 2 hours in my case. And in the doing it reported:
“Windows replaced bad clusters in files…” 5 times.
My immediate question was “Have I lost anything or not”. and of course it turns out the cluster data is in all probability lost so there is junk in the middle of the files now I guess. Doing some net research seems to show that drives are v intelligent these days and many will look to try and cover bad clusters themselves but if you actually get one escape into the big Windows world then it probably means the drive is on the way out and needs to be replaced. Hard drives are not a thing to economise on think. So its 1 AM and I’ve just placed an order for a new drive for 24 hour delivery. £80 damn-it but hopefully some peace of mind. And having ‘cleaned’ the drive with chkdisk I’m now doing a backup which will hopefully no throw up any warnings and act as cover if something horrendous happens before the new disk arrives.
The following forum thread has a great description of how hard drives work in this area – worth a read.
http://www.howtofixcomputers.com/bb/ftopic112203.html
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