Alice said:
I have used the chkdsk /f facility many times. recently I cam across the
/r switch. Can someone explain what this does differently?
Thnx
Alice
From this KB article:
An explanation of the new /C and /I Switches that are available to use
with Chkdsk.exe
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=314835
"Phase 4: Checking sectors
If the /R switch is in effect, CHKDSK runs a fourth pass to look for bad
sectors in the volume's free space. CHKDSK attempts to read every sector
on the volume to confirm that the sector is usable. Even without the /R
switch, CHKDSK always reads sectors that are associated with metadata.
Sectors that are associated with user data are read during earlier
phases of CHKDSK if the /R switch is specified.
When CHKDSK finds an unreadable sector, NTFS adds the cluster that
contains that sector to its list of bad clusters. If the bad cluster is
in use, CHKDSK allocates a new cluster to do the job of the bad cluster.
If you are using a fault-tolerant disk, NTFS recovers the bad cluster's
data and writes the data to the newly allocated cluster. Otherwise, the
new cluster is filled with a pattern of 0xFF bytes.
If NTFS encounters unreadable sectors during the course of normal
operation, NTFS remaps the sectors in the same way that it does when
CHKDSK runs. Therefore, using the /R switch is usually not essential.
However, using the /R switch is a convenient way to scan the entire
volume if you suspect that a disk might have bad sectors."
