ScanDisk

Factual Questions
1

What EXACTLY is going on when ScanDisk “finds” errors and “fixes” them all? What does an “error” look like, and how does Scandisk know how to look for them? What does ScanDisk do (physically, that is) when it finds an error, and what does the (former) error look once it’s been fixed? Also, can I run ScanDisk over any of my old girlfriends, fix their errors, and then marry them?

2

What scandisk does is it looks at the structure of the filesystem on the drive, making sure nothing is out of whack. An example of something out of whack would be -

  1. A file with no date or time associated with it
  2. Data tagged as in use but not entered in the FAT.
  3. FAT entries with no data associated with them.
  4. Two FAT entries that point to the same file.
  5. An incomplete directory listing.
    The FAT (file allocation table) is one of the characteristics of the filesystem windows uses - it has entries for every file and directory in the system, which point to the area on the drive where the data for that file actually is. The remedies for the above problems would be as follows.
  6. Associate today’s date with the file.
  7. Enter the data in the FAT, giving it the filename c:\file000x.chk.
  8. Delete the offending FAT entries.
  9. Make a copy of the file, point the first FAT entry to the original, point the second to the copy.
  10. Rebuild the directory listing by looking through the files contained on the drive.