At what point is it safe/safer to bail out of a chkdsk?

R

Robert P

Member
I've been running a chkdsk on a 320GB Western Digital IDE drive and there's obviously a problem. It went through stages 1 - 3 quickly but has been churning on stage 4 for over 24 hours, making extremely slow progress. For a long time it was stuck on 3 green "chunks" of the progress bar, then suddenly it jumped to 7 chunks which is approx 25% of the way through, been showing that same level of progress for probably 8 - 10 hours.

I've seen some references that bailing out during stage 4 or 5 shouldn't be a big deal - do you feel this is correct or no?

Is there a better way to get out of chkdsk than simply X-ing out? I initiated the chkdsk through "Properties" on the drive icon.

Thanks.
 
The drive is most likely shot. Use western digital drive diagnostic. It will tell you quickly if it's good or not.
 
What's odd is that the drive exhibits no other symptoms so far. No "This drive needs to be checked for consistency" message at boot, all the files including some big video files can be accessed just fine and copied over to an alternate storage drive with no problems. No strange sounds. I only ran across this issue because I'm going through all my drives and doing diagnostics on them.
 
The filesystem could be shot - I remember one instance where Windows would start playing up and chkdsk wouldn't complete for two _days_, but the drive itself turned out to be just fine after thorough diagnostics. Since you can access the stuff on it just fine, I'd copy everything off, reformat and copy everything back on again.

Still, you should run WD diagnostics on it just to be sure. And have backups just in case.
 
hackapelite said:
The filesystem could be shot - I remember one instance where Windows would start playing up and chkdsk wouldn't complete for two _days_, but the drive itself turned out to be just fine after thorough diagnostics. Since you can access the stuff on it just fine, I'd copy everything off, reformat and copy everything back on again.

Still, you should run WD diagnostics on it just to be sure. And have backups just in case.
Click to expand...
Everything shows as good according to WD DataLifeguard. Just for grins after archiving the contents I zero'd the drive with Dban and am now running HDTune on it.
 
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