HOWTO: Check and repair errors on your Hard Drive.

The Problem
You want to discover (and fix) Hard Drive errors.

Description
Many things can cause MS OSs to introduce errors into the data storage structure of your hard drive. These errors are not mechanical defects, but errors in the data structure, and most can be repared with software.

In some cases, unrepaired erros can can result in lost files, corrupt programs, system hangs, intermittant system problems, etc.

A leading cause of errors are improper system shutdowns, using the On/Off switch to turn your system off, using the Reset button, power failures, or anything that is not a "normal" shutdown.

As always, you should have irreplaceable documents safely backed up in at least one other location before beginning.

Procedure
I will describe the procedure for MS Windoze 95, using the built in Windows disk checker. The procedure is very similar in other windows variants.

1. Close all open programs & open MS Explorer (not Internet Explorer).

2. If you have more than one hard drive, select the HD you want to check. I'll choose C:\ in this example:



3. Right click the mouse on your C-drive, and look at the bottom of the popup for "Properties" (choose it).



4. Select the tab "Tools" from the popup.

5. Click the 1st option, "Check Now"



6. A popup will show you something similar to this:



7. Choose the "standard" option, and uncheck the "Automatically Fix Errors" box (if it was checked). This is so you can run the disk checker and see what it finds, before allowing it to fix errors.

8. I prefer the Advanced settings as shown.

9. Cick "Start".

10. The program may show or ask some things along the way.

11. Once you become familiar with how this works, and you are pretty sure you have no major catastrophe on your disk, then you might prefer to Automatically Fix Errors from the start.


Caveats
1. Always keep your critical data backed up.

2. Make sure you have no virus on your machine.

3. The NTx (including NT, Win2000, and XP) disk checker is barely adequate for NT basesd OSs. I prefer Fix It for NTx. I prefer Norton Utilities or Fix It Utilities over the built in MS disk checker for Win9x based OSs (Win95, 98, 98SE, ME).

4. Ensure you have repaired errors before posting a problem.... this will sometimes cure ailments.



Rev 1.00, 16Jun02

My friends computer was crashing all the time with ME *(missing DLL's and such), so I decided to help him out, by installing 2000 instead (he didn't have an Me disk anymore, but I am not using my 2000 any more). Of course this meant I had to delete the partition, and reformat for NTFS.... or so I thought, however, after it had "fromatted" in NTFS it showed the drive as being damaged. I then had a sinking gut feeling that I had done this by trying to format a drive that was in FAT32 to NTFS.

How would you suggest I rescue this drive.... the data is insignificant, but I would like it to be operable again. I tried then to format it in FAT32, but I think the damage was already done, and scan disk continually had to restart from the beginning, and would continuously show the same files as damaged.

Real question.... can I format it to FAT32 as a slave drive with my Master running XP, or will I need to download a disk rescuing program? (I've already grabbed a few, but I am wary to use them).

Good news and (maybe) bad news.

NTx (NT 3.xx, NT 4.xx, W2K, XP) works natively with both FAT32 and NTFS. These are called high-level disk formats, and your hard drive can care less what high level format the human is using on it. You can even used FAT16, Linux, HPFS... whatever.

If there is a problem with the disk drive, it is not related to the high level format. You can even mix formats on the same physical drive (I do this all the time).

Sooo... to be clear, the NTFS format did not "damage" the drive. You can re-format it to whatever you want. It the format process reports defects with the drive, you should run a utility to attampt to fix it... most manufacturers offer something for their own drives (e.g., Maxtor, Western Digital, etc.). Visit the website of your HD maker. The best overall disk repair program is Spinrite, by a guy named Gibson ( www.grc.com ).

BTW, you referenced "files" when talking format... files come only after a format... all files will be "wiped out" in a format, and existing fiels are irrelevant in a format. However, if some bad sectors happen to be on the disk where a file is located, it might appear that the file is what's important... but it's not.

Ive read a whole ot on the subject in the past 8 hours, and I don't feel nearly as bad any more.... I think a manufacturer's low level format si what Im a gonna do, cuz nothing else is working well. And if it makes the HD a doorstop, it's only a $10 dollar doorstop anyways.... its an old 10 gig hdd.


It'll be fun completely nuking everything it ever knew from existence.