If you ever take a moment to read about human papilloma virus, or warts, the statistics say that most people are infected with them at one point or another in their life. Luckily, the human immune system is perfectly capable of handling the virus, and most infections come and go pretty quickly.
You could say that the same is true of computer viruses (which are highly contagious). Just about any computer that gets on the internet now and then is going to pick up some viruses. If not viruses, then other hard drive troubles from normal use. This is what a hard drive diagnostic is for.
A hard drive diagnostic is like a check up with the doctor now and then (you could say a virus blocker would be the computer’s immune system). By running a quick check every once in awhile, you can catch computer viruses and other troubles before they turn into a terminal illness.
If you have a PC, you can just use the Windows Disk Utility CHKDSK. This utility is included with Windows XP, and it allows you to perform quick scans.
If you haven’t done this yet, here’s a basic tutorial:
Open “my computer”, and right click on the hard drive you wish to test. Select properties, tools, and check now. You can select either “automatically fix file system errors” or “scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors”. And there you go.
Or, using the command prompt method…
Open the command prompt; Go to start/run, and type in “cmd.”
Now type into the command prompt “chkdsk /X”, with X being the letter of whichever drive you’re checking, so chkdsk /C for the C drive, chkdsk /D for the D drive, etcetera.
Hit enter, and CHKDSK will scan your drive and report any errors to you.
Now run chkdsk /X to do a full surface scan for any bad sectors, and to fix any errors it finds. You will probably be asked to restart your computer now, as the utility needs to have exclusive access to the disk before it can do a full scan and fix the errors.
Once you’ve restarted and the utility has carried out the scan, Windows should boot up normally. You can right click “my computer” and select “manage” to check the scan report in “event viewer\applications”.
Now, how do you know when your system needs a diagnostic?
It’s a good idea to run a diagnostic on a regular basis, at least once every few months. And of course, just as with doctor checkups, you should run a diagnostic immediately if your computer is running especially slowly, if you’re experiencing any abnormalities, etcetera.
