Check Hard Disk For Problems With Check Disk Freeware

Bad sectors are the part of your computer’s hard disk that cannot be used in future due to permanent damage. They should be taken care of, as the pre-installed tools like CHKDSK and SCANDISK are provided by Microsoft systems and Bablocks are provided on Unix systems. I am going to review a tool which is quite similar to the above mentioned tools, but with some extra features and this freeware is known as Check Disk.

This tool will scan the selected area of your hard disk and then it will mark the bad sectors, which will not be used by Operation system in future. It will use different types of scans to detect the errors in the hard disk. If it diagnoses any repairable error then it will repair it after the system reboot. It also has a log view in which you can see the operations being performed on the hard disk.

The tool has three types of scans namely:

• Standard Scan

This scan will be performed in three stages. In the first stage, it will verify the files, so the name of first stage will be ‘verifying Files’. Second stage can be called as ‘Verifying Indexes’ and similarly the third stage can be called as ‘Verifying Security descriptors’. You can see the operations being performed in these stages in the log which will be present on the right side of the application window.

• Thorough Scan

This scan will be performed in five stages. First three scans will be similar to that of Standard scan but in addition it will perform two more stages. Forth stage will be called as ‘Verifying USN Journal’ and the last will be called as ‘Verifying Free space’. If it detects any error which is repairable then it will ask you to reboot your system, as it will correct it after you reboot your system. This scan takes more time as compared to the rest of the three scans.

• Check if dirty

This scan will be performed in a click. This tool will just check whether the disk space is clean or not.

You can see the status of the completion of the scan in the status bar. The size of this tool is below 500Kb and this is also portable, so you can carry it anywhere on your USB. This tool is compatible with all the versions of Windows as it has been checked with Windows 7 32-bit Ultimate edition.