How long to check/scan a disk?

[Sitara Lal]

I scheduled a CHKDSK on one of my slave drives (internal Seagate, 700GB) and
it has been running now for over 24 hours!

The screen has stopped moving after displaying "usn journal verification
completed", but the hard-disk activity light in the PC keeps flashing
regularly (along with the disk making a clicking sound, which I know is the
kiss of death).

So is this normal? If not, what should I do? How does one safely interrupt /
cancel a CHKDSK operation?

Thanks

 

[Jon]

I scheduled a CHKDSK on one of my slave drives (internal Seagate, 700GB)
and it has been running now for over 24 hours!

The screen has stopped moving after displaying "usn journal verification
completed", but the hard-disk activity light in the PC keeps flashing
regularly (along with the disk making a clicking sound, which I know is
the kiss of death).

So is this normal? If not, what should I do? How does one safely interrupt
/ cancel a CHKDSK operation?

Thanks

No it's not normal, but there are different configurations for chkdsk. If
you include the option to scan for bad sectors then yes it can take for
ever.

You'd be extremely unlucky if turning it off caused irreparable damage - so
long as you ran another chkdsk straight after without the scan for bad
sectors, if you checked that option previously. But it's impossible for
anyone to predict exactly what the outcome would be for turning off chkdsk
mid-cycle, but 9 times out of 10 there's no major harm done.