Checking Your Hard Drive for Errors (Windows 2000/XP)

In the course of regular use, computer hard drives sometimes develop errors. These can occur from power fluctuations, poorly-written software, ordinary wear and tear, or improper shutdown.

Windows XP has a built-in utility that checks your hard drive for errors, and when possible, fixes those errors.

The Windows XP utility used to check your hard drives is called CHKDSK, and is commonly pronounced "checkdisk."CHKDSK is a very powerful utility that has many advanced options that can be accessed from the command line. But we'll only cover the basics of disk checking here because we don't want to confuzle you. If you want to learn more about the finer points of CHKDSK, click here to go to Microsoft's site.

Using CHKDSK

To check your hard drives for errors in Windows XP, start by opening "My Computer."

You will see all of the drives and storage devices that are in your computer (and sometimes other things, like attached PDA's and scanners). Look for the hard drive that you want to check, and right-click on it.

When you right-click the drive icon, a menu will open up. Click on "Properties" (with the left mouse button).

On the top of the properties menu, you should see five tabs. Click on the one labeled "Tools," and you should see a box like the one on the left. In the section labeled "Error Checking," click the button that says "Check Now."

If you have certain third-party system utilities installed on your computer, what you see may look different from the box on the left. This tutorial focuses on the CHKDSK utility that come with Windows XP. If you have third-party system utilities installed, you should look in the help files for those programs.

When you click "Check Now," another box will open up. In most cases, you should check the top box to "Automatically fix file system errors." If you have reason to believe you may have bad sectors on the drive, or if you are instructed to do so by Tech Support or by a Help document, you should also check the second box to "Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors." But if you check that box, it may take many hours for the scan to complete.

Once you have made your selection, click "Start." If you checked the box to automatically fix errors or to scan for bad sectors, you will then get another box telling you that the computer must be restarted to complete the disk check, and asking for your permission to run CHKDSK after the next reboot. Click "Yes," and then restart your computer. CHKDSK will run automatically when the machine restarts.