My girlfriend has a PC, runnign XP Pro. Backup via Retrospect to external hard drive, duplicating C and D.
Last 36 hours it’s been running R E A L S L O W. And Retrospect is throwinhg up errors (log shows some errors started a month ago), complaining of corrupted volume structure.
Me, in my Mac-user ignorance, … I go searching for a program called ScanDisk. No such animal. Nothing in Start Menu/Programs/Accessories that looks like a disk-fixxit utility.
After some ferreting around I found some instrux for using a command-line util called “chkdsk”.
Ran it from the “Run” window and it did stuff and then…disappeared?!
Am currently running it directly from the command prompt.
It isn’t asking many questions, e.g., “Which disk or volume would you like to examine and/or repair?” or “Chkdsk found a zillion and a half errors on your C drive. Those errors consist of mangled file allocation tables, 11 crosslinked files, improper file count in 3 directories, and a dead raccoon hiding in the System32 folder. Do you wish to repair those now?”
Nope, it’s just cranking away doing its thing.
Am I in the right place and doing the right kind of thing to de-corrupt her corrupted volume(s)?
Security descriptor verification completed.
CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in the maste file table (MFT) bitmap.
CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in teh folume bitmap.
Windows found problems with the file system.
Run CHKDSK with the /F (fix) option to correct these.
First type ‘cmd’ and in the command line window that appears run chkdsk which will spawn it as a subprocess of cmd.
Here’s Microsoft’s site for chkdsk on XP. Using it is fairly straight forward. Type chkdsk C:\ /f and it should ask you if you want to run chkdsk the next time you reboot. Respond Yes and then reboot your computer. It will check and fix the errors it finds.
OK, it said it couldn’t fix anything because other processes were utilizing the drive, but said I could tell it to schedule a CHKDSK session on next bootup, so I said “do it” and rebooted and it did indeed run (in a weird blue screen with a white silhouette of a Windows logo, not in a black command-line screen) and now it’s rebooting (slowly) after having done so.
I think it only did “C”. I’m going to follow your instructions to have it specifically do “D”.
It may not be necessary to reboot if C:\ is your primary drive and it is able to lock D. If it is able to lock it it just won’t ask you about the reboot.
BTW, to avoid the irrational anger associated with trying to run a command line utility from the “Run” dialog, I would advise right-clicking the drive in question, bringing up “properties”, going to the “Tools” tab, and clicking “Check Now” in the “Error checking” box. It’s the GUI version of chkdsk. This should assuage your hatred of things not maclike. No need to go hunting for tools with obscure names.
Actually, it’s no weirder than running “fsck” from the OSX command line, it’s just not what I was expecting and totally foreign to my experiences.
Found and fixed mild problems on her C drive, major and severe problems on her H drive (the external USB we back up to) and then ran a fresh backup routine, this time w/o any errors to speak of.