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How do I scan my Windows 2000 disk to find bad blocks?

"How do I scan to see if there are bad spots on my hard drive? When I booted up this morning, my hard drive made a rather scary sound...like it was trying to catch but couldn't. It stalled for a bit then finally loaded.

"I know this should be obvious, but I'll be darned if I can find anything that allows me to do it. I've searched for an executable file that would let me but all I come up w/ is the Norton viral scan. I am running Microsoft Windows 2000."

Dave's Answer:

Within Windows, you'll want to open My Computer. Right click on your hard drive. Select Properties. Choose the Tools tab then use the Check Now button on the Error-Checking Section.

That should get you started. And don't be surprised if it takes rather a while to check through your disk properly: I've seen it take many hours to scan through a disk, especially if it's a large one (say, more than 20GB).

Also remember, because the C drive is your primary partition you will most likely have to reboot to allow ScanDisk to run before Windows fully loads. If that's the case, Windows will prompt you and let you know what's going on, so you should be able to step through without any problem: if you do have a problem come back here and let me know about it and I'll help you figure out the solution.

Thanks to Andrew Watt and Westley Annis for their help compiling this answer

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Comments

Scandisk found some bad sectors at the end of the hard disk but it is taking too long to mark them (days just to mark 24 clusters). Is there any faster way to mark the last 2% of the hard disk? It is not being used anyway. Or is there any disk utility that can mark bad sectors faster?

Thanks.

Posted by: Dave Chan at November 24, 2004 10:01 AM

Scandisk isn't the fastest program in the hopper, but I can't believe that it's taking days. Just how big IS this disk?

One place you can check out for more ideas about working with scandisk is :
http://www.computing.net/windowsme/wwwboard/forum/24474.html

Note especially that scandisk will restart every time a process touches the disk, so perhaps you have something else going on in background while running the program?

If you want to bail on scandisk, both Spinrite and Norton SystemWorks can also scan your disk and mark any bad blocks encountered. Spinrite is at http://www.grc.com/ and Norton is at http://www.symantec.com/sabu/sysworks/basic/

Finally, worst case, if we're not talking about your boot disk, you might just do a full backup, reformat the disk, then restore the files thereon.

Good luck!

Posted by: Dave Taylor at November 24, 2004 8:41 PM

Hi I have a toshiba A65 laptop and I believe the harddrive is crashing. It has been making pinging noises alot lately ( sounds like it is fragmented but worse there is this metal ping noise) then It reboots (by itself) after. Is there a program, I am using Xp home, to show the bad sectors and then let me reinstall somewhere clean. I am currently useing Perfectdisk when it runs I hear the noise then it stops once it gets by the bad sectors. But the program doesn't show the sectors as bad.

Posted by: greg at December 6, 2005 10:07 PM

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I do have a comment, now that you mention it!