check disk for errors

[PE]

Hi all: A few months ago I bought a new system that came with W7 home prem.
installed. About once a week since it was new, a message is displayed
during boot-up saying the disk needs to be error-checked. So I schedule an
error check for the next boot up, the error check gets performed, and then
after about a week I get the check disk for errors message again during boot
up and repeat the process. Would appreciate any advice re. whether this is
normal, and if it isn't, what should be done about it? Thanks for your
replies.

 

[Bob I]

Have you looked in Event Viewer to see what there is in the way of error
messages? If this is as regular as you say, perhaps there is a scheduled
task related to the issue? It isn't "normal" but the "cause" may be.

 

[BR549]

Hi all: A few months ago I bought a new system that came with W7 home
prem. installed. About once a week since it was new, a message is
displayed during boot-up saying the disk needs to be error-checked. So I
schedule an error check for the next boot up, the error check gets
performed, and then after about a week I get the check disk for errors
message again during boot up and repeat the process. Would appreciate any
advice re. whether this is normal, and if it isn't, what should be done
about it? Thanks for your replies.

The key here is that it's a new system and new machines should not have
disks that need to be error-checked. I would return it for either repair or
replacement.

 

[Stan Brown]

Hi all: A few months ago I bought a new system that came with W7 home prem.
installed. About once a week since it was new, a message is displayed
during boot-up saying the disk needs to be error-checked. So I schedule an
error check for the next boot up, the error check gets performed, and then
after about a week I get the check disk for errors message again during boot
up and repeat the process. Would appreciate any advice re. whether this is
normal, and if it isn't, what should be done about it? Thanks for your
replies.

It's definitely not normal.

Based on the rather scanty information, it could be a hardware
problem, a software problem, or user error. Of course if it's
hardware it's covered by warranty, and you should return the computer
before you put anything on it that you care about.

Have you observed any system crashes, or have you shut down the
computer other than by the "Shut Down" button within Windows? Either
of those can create file-system errors.

When the error check is performed at the boot, do you get a note that
Windows found and fixed the errors, or do you get a note that sectors
have been marked as bad?

 

[LouB]

It's definitely not normal.

Based on the rather scanty information, it could be a hardware
problem, a software problem, or user error. Of course if it's
hardware it's covered by warranty, and you should return the computer
before you put anything on it that you care about.

Have you observed any system crashes, or have you shut down the
computer other than by the "Shut Down" button within Windows? Either
of those can create file-system errors.

When the error check is performed at the boot, do you get a note that
Windows found and fixed the errors, or do you get a note that sectors
have been marked as bad?

+1
Return the machine if you can. It has some kind of defect.

 

[Paul]

Hi all: A few months ago I bought a new system that came with W7 home
prem. installed. About once a week since it was new, a message is
displayed during boot-up saying the disk needs to be error-checked. So
I schedule an error check for the next boot up, the error check gets
performed, and then after about a week I get the check disk for errors
message again during boot up and repeat the process. Would appreciate
any advice re. whether this is normal, and if it isn't, what should be
done about it? Thanks for your replies.

What do the SMART statistics say for the drive ?

http://www.hdtune.com/files/hdtune_255.exe

That program, when you run it, has a "Health" tab. On this particular
disk, the Current Pending Sector count is non-zero. The number 17 there,
means 17 sectors somewhere, have been detected as flaky, and the next
time Windows goes to write to them, the drive controller will evaluate
the sector, to see whether it's worth keeping. A spare sector would be
used in its place, and an entry in a table made (to keep track of what
sectors are now spared out). A large pending sector count, implies
the drive health is headed downhill. My two drives currently, have
zero for Current Pending, and have had it that way, every time I've
checked. It doesn't mean my drives have never had bad sectors. It just
means there isn't a "pile of work to do". A large Pending Count implies
bad sectors may be building up, and perhaps there is a bad patch on
the platter surface.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_pJZ6uImDq.../s400/HDTune_Health_WDC_WD6401AALS-00L3B2.png

You can also test the hard drive, with the manufacturer's diagnostic.
In that example image, the drive was made by Western Digital. You'd
check the WesternDigital web site in that case, and look for their
drive test. You read the instructions on the drive test, to see
if it is read-only (safe) or read/write (destructive). I haven't used
all of them, and that's why I recommend reading any warnings before using
them. The manufacturer diagnostic can give you a quick answer as
to whether the drive is defective or not.

It doesn't matter what kind of computer you have, it always can benefit
from a backup strategy. Even if you followed the suggestion to return
the computer, the next computer will need backups for safety. A separate
external hard drive in USB enclosure, can help you by providing the space
needed for a backup. And then, if something ever happens to the hard drive,
your data is safe. Prices start at about $50 for 250GB and perhaps $100 for 1TB.

The suggestion to run the disk check, may be related to the efforts
to defragment the drive once a week. Defragmentation may be scheduled
by the OS, and perhaps the perception of a drive problem, is a side
effect of something happening during defragmentation. I'd want to
(somehow), check what is happening during defrag (status report) -
perhaps an error is being thrown in defrag, and that's what is creating
this mystery. Defragmentation is a bit different in Windows 7, in that
the defragmenter only defragments smaller files, and doesn't attempt to
work on file hogs. It means the defragmenter can work a bit faster.
And by running weekly, it reduces the time spent on the task, to
manageable levels. It may attempt to do the work at night, but if
the computer is switched off at night, I don't think the scheduled
event is smart enough to move itself to the daytime. The defragmenter
should not run, if chkdsk shows the partition has problems. It's not
a good idea, for the defragmenter to run, if the file system is
damaged.

http://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/e7/...ntationBackgroundandEngineer_CA52/image_8.png

( http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/...d-engineering-the-windows-7-improvements.aspx )

It's possible that running one CHKDSK will clean up the problem, and
it never comes back. You'd want to verify as well, what the results
of CHKDSK show.

http://www.w7forums.com/use-chkdsk-check-disk-t448.html

The thread here, recommends using event viewer (eventvwr.msc) to look for
the chkdsk log.

http://www.sevenforums.com/crashes-debugging/63428-chkdsk-errors.html

Chkdsk works at the file system level, and not the physical level.
HDTune and the manufacturer diagnostic, are more interested in the
physical level. Chkdsk would be seeing the side effects of bad
sectors, if they were present. The file system can be corrupted
for other reasons than physical. If chkdsk shows some weird errors,
more than little things, then that might be a sign there has
been some damage in the recent past to the file system.

Paul

 

[relic]

Hi all: A few months ago I bought a new system that came with W7 home
prem. installed. About once a week since it was new, a message is
displayed during boot-up saying the disk needs to be error-checked. So I
schedule an error check for the next boot up, the error check gets
performed, and then after about a week I get the check disk for errors
message again during boot up and repeat the process. Would appreciate any
advice re. whether this is normal, and if it isn't, what should be done
about it? Thanks for your replies.

It's fairly common.

First, run chkntfs. If it persists:

If you have access to any CD from Windows 2000 and later, boot it, enter the
Recovery Console, run chkdsk /r from there.

 

[johnbee]

< "PE" wrote in message

Hi all: A few months ago I bought a new system that came with W7 home prem.
installed. About once a week since it was new, a message is displayed
during boot-up saying the disk needs to be error-checked. So I schedule an
error check for the next boot up, the error check gets performed, and then
after about a week I get the check disk for errors message again during boot
up and repeat the process. Would appreciate any advice re. whether this is
normal, and if it isn't, what should be done about it? Thanks for your
replies. >

It is extremely unlikely that there is anything wrong really wrong with the
disk which needs error checking. This is almost the last thing you should
expect with a newish PC.
The most obvious thing from the symptoms you describe is that you have
somehow set it to give the message at regular intervals when you bought it,
either using Windows or some installed software utility. It is unlikely
that the person who set it up made a mistake if is really was new rather
than being something done e.g. after being on display at a shop. Of course
if you asked for it to be a FAT disk with regular error checking, it is your
own fault, but I suspect you would have remembered that.

So if you know how to check the task scheduling and registry regular
checking, look at that first of all. If you don't know how to do that,
leave a message here and someone will tell you. Nobody has said that yet
because that solution is a bit simple. I must tell you from what you say
that I strongly suspect you set this off yourself - don't worry about that
at all - I have done far dafter things very often and I am not a beginner.

If this doesn't remove the message post again - it could be a hundred and
fifty things.

 

[Stan Brown]

+1
Return the machine if you can. It has some kind of defect.

I don't think you can assume that, on the quite limited evidence
given by the OP. It's a possibility, but it's also possible that he
loaded some software that keeps crashing, or he's shutting it down
wrong.

 

[Stan Brown]

Fix your quoting style, please. It is impossible to tell what the OP
said and what you said.

If you're using Windows Live Mail, please either get a real
newsreader or edit appropriately by hand.

Thanks!

 

[Gene E. Bloch]

< "PE" wrote in message

Hi all: A few months ago I bought a new system that came with W7 home prem.
installed. About once a week since it was new, a message is displayed
during boot-up saying the disk needs to be error-checked. So I schedule an
error check for the next boot up, the error check gets performed, and then
after about a week I get the check disk for errors message again during boot
up and repeat the process. Would appreciate any advice re. whether this is
normal, and if it isn't, what should be done about it? Thanks for your
replies. >

It is extremely unlikely that there is anything wrong really wrong with the
disk which needs error checking. This is almost the last thing you should
expect with a newish PC.
The most obvious thing from the symptoms you describe is that you have
somehow set it to give the message at regular intervals when you bought it,
either using Windows or some installed software utility. It is unlikely
that the person who set it up made a mistake if is really was new rather
than being something done e.g. after being on display at a shop. Of course
if you asked for it to be a FAT disk with regular error checking, it is your
own fault, but I suspect you would have remembered that.

So if you know how to check the task scheduling and registry regular
checking, look at that first of all. If you don't know how to do that,
leave a message here and someone will tell you. Nobody has said that yet
because that solution is a bit simple. I must tell you from what you say
that I strongly suspect you set this off yourself - don't worry about that
at all - I have done far dafter things very often and I am not a beginner.

If this doesn't remove the message post again - it could be a hundred and
fifty things.

Please - as a favor to all of us - get a newsreader that marks the
quoted material.

 

[Gene E. Bloch]

My newsreader doesn't automatically check for new posts (it can be done,
I've read, but I haven't tried to set up the script). And apparently, I
don't refresh it manually very often, so, a bit over 35 minutes later, I
essentially duplicated your reply

OTOH, to quote from something I said to you a little while ago in
another thread,
"Here's a way to look at it: your post [with a similar message] was
important enough to bear repeating "

 

[johnbee]

"Gene E. Bloch" wrote in message

< "PE" wrote in message

Hi all: A few months ago I bought a new system that came with W7 home
prem.
installed. About once a week since it was new, a message is displayed
during boot-up saying the disk needs to be error-checked. So I schedule
an
error check for the next boot up, the error check gets performed, and then
after about a week I get the check disk for errors message again during
boot
up and repeat the process. Would appreciate any advice re. whether this
is
normal, and if it isn't, what should be done about it? Thanks for your
replies. >

It is extremely unlikely that there is anything wrong really wrong with
the
disk which needs error checking. This is almost the last thing you should
expect with a newish PC.
The most obvious thing from the symptoms you describe is that you have
somehow set it to give the message at regular intervals when you bought
it,
either using Windows or some installed software utility. It is unlikely
that the person who set it up made a mistake if is really was new rather
than being something done e.g. after being on display at a shop. Of
course
if you asked for it to be a FAT disk with regular error checking, it is
your
own fault, but I suspect you would have remembered that.

So if you know how to check the task scheduling and registry regular
checking, look at that first of all. If you don't know how to do that,
leave a message here and someone will tell you. Nobody has said that yet
because that solution is a bit simple. I must tell you from what you say
that I strongly suspect you set this off yourself - don't worry about that
at all - I have done far dafter things very often and I am not a beginner.

If this doesn't remove the message post again - it could be a hundred and
fifty things.

Please - as a favor to all of us - get a newsreader that marks the
quoted material.

--
Gene E. Bloch (Stumbling Bloch)


I put angle brackets round the message to which I was replying, and thought
it was perfectly clear which was the text I wrote and to what I was
replying. It is of course much more difficult to tell that from your
message with that plethora of brackets.

However, I will buy your suggestion. I have tried many newsreaders most
hardly worked at all, many were just too difficult to fathom, and I liked
Outlook Express best of what I termed the newer ones. That was a large
number of years ago: perhaps some others have got better since then so I
will have a good look around. However I have very little patience with
software that doesn't work without a big effort or where the instructions
are plainly wrong.

 

[Gene E. Bloch]

"Gene E. Bloch" wrote in message



Please - as a favor to all of us - get a newsreader that marks the
quoted material.

Your quoting punctuation is broken (i.e., non-existent); moreover, you
unfortunately put your latest reply after the signature delimiter, which
is why it was greyed out by my newsreader, and also why it has
(automatically) disappeared from this reply...

There are conventions for quoting. Your version of WLM ignores them
(that is Microsoft's fault) and your hand-made quoting doesn't even
begin to follow them. In fact, all I saw was a less-than sign in the
first character of your post that I replied to. If this is what you're
referring to, then it totally fails to meet the standards.

If you can't make sense of my quoting, which is 100% standard, then you
need to find some tutorials for Usenet and learn about the standard
methods that have been in place for decades. This should also help you
get your own posts squared away...

 

[Char Jackson]

There are conventions for quoting. Your version of WLM ignores them
(that is Microsoft's fault) and your hand-made quoting doesn't even
begin to follow them. In fact, all I saw was a less-than sign in the
first character of your post that I replied to. If this is what you're
referring to, then it totally fails to meet the standards.

If you can't make sense of my quoting, which is 100% standard, then you
need to find some tutorials for Usenet and learn about the standard
methods that have been in place for decades. This should also help you
get your own posts squared away...

Well said, Gene. Thanks for doing that.

 

[Gene E. Bloch]

Well said, Gene. Thanks for doing that.

Thanks, Char.

Actually, I just now noticed something in one of johnbee's posts. I was
looking for something else, and happened to open one of his posts. I
noticed that he had put a "<" at the beginning of his reply, ahead of
some text, and a ">" at the end of that text. From what he said, I
realized that he thought he was setting that off as the quoted text.

I have to say that at least it was an honest attempt...

For johnbee, if you're reading this: if you're not going to use the
standard methods, at least use something that is *visible*. For
instance, the kind of thing I've demonstrated below, (which is modeled
on HTML and other languages):

<QUOTE>
All the quoted material will be here
..
..
..
and it eventually ends.
</QUOTE>

Note the slash in the second token, which means "end of quote", or more
exactly, end of <QUOTE>. This is a standard use of the slash in HTML,
XML, and other such languages.

This will unfortunately probably not capture the history, i.e., the time
sequence of the posts that are quoted.