What does Check Disk (in DeviceManager/Disk Properties/tools/Error Checking Do ?

[Al Dykes]

(This is w2k SP4 question, if it's OT, I'm sorry.)

In Control Panel/DeviceManager/Disk Properties/tols/Error Checking

There is a "check now" button that takes so long to run that I hope
it's doing something. It does 5 passes with no hint about what it's
checking for.

I have several questions;

- What do the passes do ?
- If any problems are found are the logged somewhere ?
- If a serious problem is found does it pause ?

- There are two options;
- Automatically fix file system errors
- Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors

What does "recovery of bad sectors" mean ?

If they are talking about a badblocks tool that reads all sectors and
marks marginal ones as bad and puts them in a bad-block table the
author of this screen needs a human editor.

For extra credit; I ran chkdsk /f on a newly-installed 160GB disk,
with about 40GB of files on it and it ran faster than any chkdsk I've
ever seen (it's been a couple of years since I screwed with hardware,
and back then I was working with 20GB disks). Chkdsk used to take
ages.

Is this a feature of recent versions of NTFS spec ?

Thanks

 

[dev]

/Al Dykes/ said:

(This is w2k SP4 question, if it's OT, I'm sorry.)

In Control Panel/DeviceManager/Disk Properties/tols/Error Checking

There is a "check now" button that takes so long to run that I hope
it's doing something. It does 5 passes with no hint about what it's
checking for.

I have several questions;

- What do the passes do ?
- If any problems are found are the logged somewhere ?
- If a serious problem is found does it pause ?

- There are two options;
- Automatically fix file system errors
- Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors

What does "recovery of bad sectors" mean ?

If they are talking about a badblocks tool that reads all sectors and
marks marginal ones as bad and puts them in a bad-block table the
author of this screen needs a human editor.

For extra credit; I ran chkdsk /f on a newly-installed 160GB disk,
with about 40GB of files on it and it ran faster than any chkdsk I've
ever seen (it's been a couple of years since I screwed with hardware,
and back then I was working with 20GB disks). Chkdsk used to take
ages.

Is this a feature of recent versions of NTFS spec ?

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;218461