It’s embarassing to have to ask. OTOH, this ought to prove just how trouble-free your average XP installation is.
Today, when I turned the machine on, it went into chkdsk, said it was scheduled. Flinkin’ thing took an hour (it’s these monster HDs; my PC isn’t fast by today’s standards, but it does have a 2GHz processor and half a gig of RAM).
After the first 20 minutes, and it hadn’t even got to the actual sector by sector (or whatever it is these days) check, I wanted to scream. Knowing how Micro$oft sets things up, I was afraid that if I rebooted, it would only start again from the beginning. I tried various keys, trying to interrupt it, but no dice.
I’ve checked the task scheduler, including the “reveal hidden” and found nothing. I also tried the “Help and Support” :dubious: module.
How do I find out if it’s still lurking someplace to ambush me again? … at the most inconvenient time, of course; that’s MS. And is there a way I can go back and see how it happened? Nobody else uses this machine, and I swear I never told it to run chkdsk. I use Norton utilities.
You might want to run chkdsk from the command line without the /F switch but with /V once overnight to see what it says the problem is. ie enter
C:\>chkdsk c: /v
in a command window when you’re done with the machine and let it chug for however long.
Without the /F switch it won’t write any repairs to disk, so it can’t hurt anything. But it will give you an inventory of the problems it finds.
FYI, on my 1.8Ghz machine with 512MB ram, doing a complete chkdsk /v of a half-full 40GB drive after a fresh reboot takes about 200 seconds. Time ought to be roughly proportional to disk size unless the volume is extremely full or extremely empty.
If your chkdsk times are greatly different from that, you do have a problem, either hardware or software, and ignoring it isn’t smart. Backup NOW and fix it.
Yeah. If chkdsk takes more than about 30 seconds on that machine, you’ve got a major problem with either the disk harware or NTFS itself. Backup NOW and chkdsk with the /f and let it take its time to do its thing.