Stopping hard drive checks

  • Thread starter Thread starter The Old Timer
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The Old Timer

I was having a reoccurring problem whereby XP wasn't increasing the
available free space on my hard drives when I deleted large video files from
my hard drive. XP refused to format the partition in question saying that
it could not do so. I then tried Partition Magic 8 & it recovered the
missing space once the PC had rebooted.

Now every time I boot up I get the messages that the hard drive needs to be
checked. How do I stop this happening every time I turn machine on?
 
The Old Timer said:
I was having a reoccurring problem whereby XP wasn't increasing the
available free space on my hard drives when I deleted large video files from
my hard drive. XP refused to format the partition in question saying that
it could not do so. I then tried Partition Magic 8 & it recovered the
missing space once the PC had rebooted.

Now every time I boot up I get the messages that the hard drive needs to be
checked. How do I stop this happening every time I turn machine on?
Click to expand...

Make sure, if the option exists, that S.M.A.R.T. is enabled in the BIOS; its
purpose is to detect failing HDD's before they fail completely.

Check the Event Viewer for problems being reported, particularly ones
concerned with the disk. See anything? If so, and I suspect you will, then
your HDD may be about to die, perhaps dramatically and you should
immediately get another HDD and use *its* utility to create a
*bootable*copy* of your current HDD (a normal copy, such as from Windows
Explorer, will NOT work to make a bootable copy of your existing HDD). If
you have HDD problems thus indicated, don't use it anymore and just turn the
power off, because the very next thing you do should be to replace it and
properly copy it to the new HDD before it's too late.

Otherwise, boot the XP CD and go into Recovery Console. There do this:
chkdsk /R (this will take quite a while for the operation to complete, it
probably is NOT hung even in absence of apparent HDD activity)
exit

That will check for bad sectors, something a normal chkdsk will not do but
could result in the problem you described.
 
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