Why no chkdsk after XP crash/reboot?

[Alturas]

In Win98 and WinMe, when my computers crashed and I had to power-off
manually by holding down the power button, ScanDisk would always run on
reboot (blue screen).

With WinXP, it just reboots as if no crash happened. Is chkdsk running
behind the scenes or is this not standard procedure? When I run chkdsk
manually the corrupt files it (occasionally) finds don't seem related to
the crashes. Is XP self-repairing via some sort of cache?

Alturas

 

[::Cory::]

XP does run chkdsk on a failed proper shutdown. However it will not run if
the crash impedes the computer's ability to report the crash to itself. So
when you do not see the chkdsk happen after a crash, XP is not aware a crash
occurred.

::CORY::

 

[Richard Urban]

The NTFS file system structure is not prone to the same problems that
plagued the fat 16 and fat32 file systems. Therefore you will not "usually"
have chkdsk run automatically after an improper shutdown.

Even a BSOD will not usually cause chkdsk to run, although I manually run
chkdsk C: /f after such a happening. There will usually be a minor problem
corrected that doesn't impede the operating system in any way. The file
system and the operating system recover nicely without the interruption of
chkdsk.

Isn't that nice?

--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!

 

[Alturas]

The NTFS file system structure is not prone to the same problems that
plagued the fat 16 and fat32 file systems. Therefore you will not
"usually" have chkdsk run automatically after an improper shutdown.

Even a BSOD will not usually cause chkdsk to run, although I manually
run chkdsk C: /f after such a happening. There will usually be a minor
problem corrected that doesn't impede the operating system in any way.
The file system and the operating system recover nicely without the
interruption of chkdsk.

Isn't that nice?

That explains a lot. FWIW, my PC may be crashing (3 or 4 times a week)
because of a Mercury motherboard graphics issue that affected various circa
2000 HP Pavilions. The crashes always seem to occur when I'm online and
scrolling on certain websites. NTFS or not, these crashes might not create
the type of data loss that chkdsk would have to repair.

Alturas