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Article Title: Windows XP Builtin Data & Disk Integrity Scan

Article Author: Daryl Quenet
Article Category: OS Related
Times Read: 10334
Date: 2007-01-12 18:15:12
Pages: 1

The other day I was asked if there was a tool in Windows XP that was equivalent to ScanDisk for Windows 95 / 98 / ME. ScanDisk is a utility originally introduced in MS-DOS 6.22 and Microsoft Windows systems which checks and repairs filesystems and bad clusters. It can scan the entire file system to check the data integrity of your hard drives.

Now NTFS pretty much became the mandatory file system with the introduction of Windows XP. As some of you might have seen in one of my previous articles about the Mediasonic HM1, Windows XP has a maximum size of 32gb for FAT32 partitions. The only way to get around this is with Norton Partition Magic, however if your running Windows XP64 your stuck as it is an unsupported operating system.

Now previous versions of Windows had scandisk located in the Accessories. Now starting with Windows XP there was a large push for tighter integration between the Operating System and the hardware. Now there are two ways to get to the Windows XP.

The first and my preferred method is Click on Start then My Computer. Once in My Computer you will see a list of all your drives. Now right click on the drive that is to be checked, and from the list that drops down select Properties. Now an information window will pop up with Information about that hard drive, also on this screen you will see a bunch of Tabs. Now click on the tab called Tools, and select Check Now.
The alternative is click the Start button, then right click on My Computer and select Manage. Now the Computer Management window will open up, from here click on Storage then Disk Management. Inside of disk management you will see a list of all your disks, now like the first method right click on your disk and select Properties, then tools, then Check Now.

After you click Check Now it will display options for checking your disk drive. The options are "Automatically fix file system errors" and "Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sections". The first option will tell the program to automatically fix any errors it encounters with the File System such as Cross Linked files, or FAT (File Allocation Table) corruption. The second option will make Error Checking check your entire drive regardless if there is data or it is empty for bad sectors. If you don't select the second option the error checking will be very quick. For those of you familiar with chkdsk if you only select the first option "Automatically fix file system errors" it is the same as running chkdsk /f from the command prompt.

If the file system you wish to check is in use you will get the following message "The disk check could not be performed because the disk check utility needs exclusive access to some Windows files on the disk. These files can be accessed only by restarting Windows. Do you want to schedule this disk check to occur the next time you restart the computer?" It will then give you a yes or no prompt, if you select Yes it will simply queue up the request without forcing a restart.

If this tool doesn't solve your disk issues you may wish to check out Norton Disk Doctor or GLC Spinrite. Both of these are corporate utilities commonly used at support / computer companies.