Check Disk at startup on External Drive

[Tom461]

On a nearly new Vista Home HP Pavilion, check disk runs at start up on the
1TB WD external hard drive. I determined that the dirty bit is set to On.
Several questions: (1) Can check disk be safely stopped while in progress,
maybe by keying Control+C? (2) Can the external hard drive be excluded from
checkdisk automatically running, since it is used only for backups? (3)
having previously repaired this disk with Windows software, could anything be
likely causing repeated disk errors on the external hard drive? (4) What
would be the best strategy from here? Could a backup battery be causing
problems with the external hard drive (just a wild guess)? I am new to having
an external hard drive, so I don't know what problems lurk...

 

[Tom461]

This looks very helpful. I will try it in a day or so when I can get at this
computer. Since it took several hours to run check disk on the 1 TB external
hard drive, can you tell me if there is any way, short of unplugging the
drive, for shutting down an unwanted check disk in progress? Many thanks.