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Newsday, Melville, N.Y., Lou Dolinar Column: Hard-Drive Checkup a Good Idea for PCs

Posted on: Sunday, 7 May 2006, 06:06 CDT

By Lou Dolinar, Newsday, Melville, N.Y.

May 7--Hard drives don't last forever. Like any mechanical gizmo in constant motion, things wear out and break. Hard drives also develop their own unique problems having to do with how data's stored on them.

That means you should, occasionally, run diagnostic software on your hard disk. As your PC ages, you may want to do this every month or so.

Chkdsk is the main built-in diagnostic in Windows XP. You can run it from the DOS command line, but it's easier to open up My Computer, right-click on your disk drive, and choose Properties. The Tools tab gives you three options: Error Checking, Defragmentation and Backup. This week we'll worry about Error Checking, aka Chkdsk. Select it and you'll be given two additional options: "Automatically find and fix file system errors" and "Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors."

Chkdsk won't run immediately. It can't start up when other files are open, so you'll be prompted as to whether you want to run it next time Windows restarts. Click "yes" and restart your computer. It could take an hour or so to run all the relevant checks.

The program does a couple of things: First, it verifies the integrity of the file system - basically, the internal directory the computer uses to find files and folders, which can be scattered in noncontiguous fragments across the disk surface. Sometimes the file system loses track of one or more of these fragments, and Chksk tries to stitch them back together.

The program also performs a check of the surface of a disk. Disks can develop magnetic "weak spots" that are difficult or impossible to read - the computer may have to back up a half-dozen times before it can pick up the data. Chkdsk will attempt to recover data on weak spots, move it to another sector of the hard drive, then lock out the bad section so it won't be used again.

An occasional error found by Chkdsk is no cause for alarm. If you start turning up a lot of errors, and if the number seems to increase over time, you're probably due for a new hard drive. You do have your files backed up, don't you?

You might also turn to SMART (self-monitoring analysis and reporting technology), an industry standard troubleshooting function that's built into most hard drives. It looks for signs of impending drive failure - for example, drive spin-up takes longer than it should, indicating that a motor might be failing - and keeps a log of these parameters on disk. Unfortunately, this function hasn't been implemented in a consistent fashion by computer and motherboard manufacturers. Some PCs issue a warning in the BIOS (basic input/output system), when appropriate, but others may require you to use an aftermarket program - Norton Utilities has this function - to read the SMART results.

A free (for personal use) alternative is DiskCheck from Passmark Software (www.passmark.com/ products/diskcheckup.htm). Disk- Check looks at more than a dozen specific values, like read error and write errors, and gives you a pass-fail grade on each. In addition, it records and rates drive performance on each on a scale of one to 100, alongside a known threshold value for problematic drives. Over time, as your drive deteriorates, you can monitor how the value approaches the threshold failure value.

If your drive has actually failed, use another computer to check the manufacturer's Web site before you panic. Most have extensive downloadable diagnostic and repair programs for their own drives. The big deal here is creating a test CD that you can use to start the computer directly, without loading Windows from the hard drive. According to Seagate Technologies and other disk drive manufacturers, most of the drives that are returned under warranty are, in fact, working - the problem is with the software, not the hardware. The startup disk bypasses all potential Windows problems, and checks out the drive directly.

To our readers

Consumer Watch columnist Henry Gilgoff is on leave; his column will return in a few weeks.

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Copyright (c) 2006, Newsday, Melville, N.Y.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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Source: Newsday, Melville, N.Y.

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