May 30 2008
Windows XP chkdsk
Windows XP chkdsk is a tool available for you in Windows. Everyone should run it from time to time because it can prevent your computer from becoming unstable.
There are different reasons why the data on your hard disk can become corrupt. Windows keeps “meta-data” about each file and every directory on your hard drive in a Master File Table (MFT).
Meta-data is data about the data. Windows needs it to physically locate your files on the hard drive, to know about user access rights for each file and so on.
In some cases, the information in the MFT can become corrupt. This can be the case when your computer experiences a sudden power cut or a system hang. To make things even worse, your hard disk may show signs of wear over time and some sectors may become unreadable.
Windows XP chkdsk is the tool to handle these situations. It can fix logical errors on your hard disk and it can detect bad sectors and flag them so that Windows no longer uses them.
It’s a valuable tool, but it has a disadvantage …
… checking and fixing an entire hard disk is a tough job, so chkdsk can take a considerable amount of TIME under certain conditions.
The time needed for chkdsk to run is very hard to predict because it depends on many factors :
* Overall speed of your pc
* Number of files and directories on the disk
* Size of the disk
* Amount of RAM
* …
A gigantic disk with 2 extremely large files will take considerably less time to check than a small disk with 2 million tiny files, but so many other factors are to be considered … never easy to tell.
