Hard Drive Diagnostic Software

[Ralf Maximus]

Shouldn't be necessary to do boot-time chkdsk of an external drive though, you should be able to do that under normal windows operation :-s

-f0dder (November 28, 2007, 06:41 AM)

Like, chkdsk d: /f/r where d: is the drive letter of choice.  It may ask you to unmount the volume first (say Yes) but then it runs in the background.

[tinjaw]

When I do a chkdsk on the external, it is finding the errors, but it reports "Errors found.  CHKDSK cannot continue in read-only mode." So I assumed that means I need to do it at boot time.

[f0dder]

When I do a chkdsk on the external, it is finding the errors, but it reports "Errors found.  CHKDSK cannot continue in read-only mode." So I assumed that means I need to do it at boot time.

-tinjaw (November 28, 2007, 06:51 AM)

Nah, just means you have to do "/f", as Ralf mentioned. "volume unmount" should only happen if you have open files/folders on the drive.

[Armando]

When I rebooted, it started to perform the chkdsk, but on the C: drive. I went to bed. When I woke up Windows was booted and I can't tell if it even did a chkdsk on the external USB drive.

So I have shelved this until the weekend when I will put the drive in a sled and stick it in a box so it is connected to a proper IDE controller.

-tinjaw (November 28, 2007, 05:01 AM)

Really ? Not mentions of anything in the event log ?

[tinjaw]

Nope. The event log was the first thing I checked.

I'm at home now and I just started up chkdsk f: /f /r. We'll see what happens. Ah! as I am typing this I just saw it say that it deleted the directory that was the one I was having problems with.

Time to make some dinner and check back with it in a little while.

Thanks everybody for the help.

[tinjaw]

It finished and it found one bad block and some problems with the file table. But now I can get through the "Error-checking" on the Tools tab without any problems. It looks like I may have gotten off lucky. I think it was because the drive was already in power save mode and it only fell three feet onto a carpeted floor.

[Ralf Maximus]

I think it would be cool if they could add a small G-sensor to disk drives, and hook them up to a small piezo speaker so they would issue a blood-curdling scream if they fall to the floor.