Help and Support Pages

How to Check a Hard Disk for Errors

Using the Windows Utility to Check the Disk

• Select the drive to check in (My) Computer
• Right click on it and choose 'Properties'.
• On the 'tools' tab choose 'check now'
• Ensure that both checkboxes are ticked.

This will schedule a scan for the next time windows restarts. In my experience it is better to set this scan away straight away because for some reason it doesn't seem to schedule properly on some installations of XP if you do other things after you have scheduled the job.

After the disk check is complete, check your logs to see if there are any bad sectors / files on your disk

(Details on how to check the logs can be found here.) If there are bad sectors /files then your hard disk may be about to die so back it up straight away and replace the disk.

I hope this is of some help to someone. Thanks, Ste Edgoose