Replacement for chkdsk

[Guest_imported]

Is there something else you can use, other than chkdsk? Because the thing is always so vague:

"Windows has found one or more problems on the drive"
Well... what is it? MFT error? Lost clusters? What? And did it even get fixed?

Or, most of the time it just says: "Windows has finished checking the drive" or nothing at all... so did it find errors? Did it fix them? what?

And yes there are exit codes, but to fix errors, you need to run it at boot-time, in which case exit codes are useless.

 

[dakota81]

I'd sure like to know myself, I once trusted ScanDisk when I was concerned a drive was experiencing troubles...

I had physical damage to the harddrive, bad sectors forming, and ScanDisk did nothing but report that the drive was fine - lost a good amount of data that day...

 

[linney]

If you run chkdsk from a Dos prompt you might get more info in the report. At least you'll be able to read what it says it did.


An Explanation of the New /C and /I Switches That Are Available to Use with Chkdsk.exe (Q314835)


Does the manufacturer of your hard drive have a diagnostic tool for the drive at their website?

 

[Yegolev]

Not free but it's the best thing you can get:

http://grc.com/spinrite.htm

hth

 

[Guest_imported]

Not free... dayom...

and I do run it from a console, linney. But the boot partition can be only scanned correctly at boot time since XP can't get a lock otherwise (and if you don't specify /f, then results are not accurate as contents are always changing) and at boottime autochk.exe doesn't do the whole /c switch thing.

 

[Guest_imported]

Sorry, I didn't mean the /c switch... I meant the "show cleanup messages" switch... can't remember what that is now... not at my PC.