Chkdsk /f

[Loose rivets]

Further to the loss of the original HD on my HP desktop, I finally gave up after trying Recuva from the nice people that make Ccleaner. Very logical presentation, but couldn't see the very folder that I was looking for. Anyway, I digress.

Using the HP recovery disc, I, for the second time, installed XP Home.

The newer drive was powered down and out of the equation.

All seemed to go okay, but then I went to DOS and tried CHKDSK. It ran, but reported a file ?system fault. It told me to run CHKDSK /f if I wanted to fix it.

Can't...it says, cos I'm using that volume. Then it says that it will effect changes on re-boot. This I do.

Just the same two more times. Did it again with the same result.

I want an XP backup, but it takes hours of messing about with getting rid of the dross that HP think I can't live without, so how much time to invest in a drive that might be tricky.

In short, does going back to an old DOS command, throw up errors that are not there? What's the best way to test this drive before I commit to the time?

Remind me please. Vista was the first OS not to need a third parties partition program wasn't it? I really want to split the drive again. Oh, and that's another thing. I would like C D E ... but without losing the Restore partition. That seems to be quite transparent to the user in Vista and W7.

A Red Herring? In the W7 disk management program, physical drive 0 is C D E in that order. However, when the old physical drive - drive 1 is listed as the second drive, it shows as 5gigs of Restore first, then the main drive which is C when booting, but H when I'm in W7.

Does this literally mean the Restore partition is nearer the edge? - an edge that in the old days be required for primary OS files. If so, would CHKDSK be fooled by this?

[Jofm5]

Just for background...

Chkdsk is a utility that will scan the file allocation tables for incosistencies and report them - if the /f (fix) option is used it will attempt a repair which usually results in orphaned clusters being put in a folder named FIX.XXX (xxx is an incrementing number depending times run and on if fix.000 is there etc) - these clusters will be broken down into logical groups into files recovered.xxx etc.

chkdsk does not care or look at partitions - so dont get confused with the partition scheme across disks - it only looks at the file system within a partition.

Partitioning:.....

You can grow (and maybe shrink - not tried that ) paritions however..... if you have allocated a 1gb partition and there is a file occupying space near the upper boundry of the partition you will not be able to shrink the partition as the space is considered in use. To get around this if you use a defragmentation utilitly to place all the clusters consecutively near the bottom end of the partition you should be able to shrink the partition to make available space for another partition.

Drive lettering (yes a red herring)....

If I recall correctly from the DOS days on how the letters are initially assigned it will be C: is your primary boot partition and then the rest are assigned on the principle of the next letters used will be primary partitions on subsequent drives e.g. if you have 1 additional physical drive the primary partition on that will default to D: (if 2 E: will be the next primary partition) and then it will go through allocating letters in order of secondary partitions from the first drive onwards.

So in the example of 2 disks with disk 1 having a primary and secondary partition and disk 2 only having a primary partition the scheme would be C: being your boot partition on disk 1, D: the primary partition on disk 2 and E: the secondary partition on disk 1.

This is all pretty much by the by as you can use the disk manager in XP/vista/W7 to reallocate the drive letters to what you like - so in the example you could change D: to F: temporarily - assign E: to D: (as it is now not in use) and then change f: to E:.

As you can see from the above your restore partition has not moved but has just been allocated a different identifier.

Back to the original question of chkdsk and whether it reports something that is not there: -

If chkdsk is reporting a problem and cannot fix it then it will keep on reporting the problem endlessly - the fact that it is running is an indication that you are using a file system it supports as it would terminate otherwise.

If this is going to be a new install then re-format the partition as it sounds like you could have a dodgy cylinder on the disk (e.g. a correction is written by chkdsk but is not read back as being corrected). DO NOT do a quick format as this will only re-write the file allocation table with a blank one, if you do a full format which will take longer it will verify the sectors as it goes and allocate out those that are bad in the file allocation table.

This could be an indication that the disk itself is on its way out and may need replacing soon - so some advice would be to make sure anything critical on this physical disk is backed up.

[Keef]

Empty hard drives are not expensive.

If it's messing about that much, my inclination would be to spend a few quid on Ebay and get a new one.

[Loose rivets]

Thank you Jo for the comprehensive answer.


Keef...where's the fun in that? Remember, I come from an era where a colleague would bind his tires with bandages and Bostik so that he could use his half gallon a week wartime allowance. Us hoarders have to have things like this prized out of our hands.

Trust data to it again? Nah...Just experiment with it.