chkdsk & SpinRite

[DasFox]

I'm studying for my A+ and I have Mike Meyers book, and in it he mentions for maintenance to use chkdsk once a week.

Personally I've never used chkdsk unless I felt there was a reason valid enough to use it, but of course drives can die out of the blue...

Also he mentions the ECC in drives not always working and marking back sectors and using SpinRite as another tool that should be used to help identify any problems here that the hard drive fails to see, and mark the sectors that the drives ECC fails to do...

What are some thought here on using chkdsk on a regular basis for maintenance?

Also I'm wondering if Mike is mentioning SpinRite, then should all us geeks and techs have this in our supply of tools to use, no geek should be without it?

THANKS

 

[0roo0roo]

some a+ is bullsh*t.
google the google harddrive failure study.
doing stuff like spinrite is a waste of time, failing drives a luck of the draw.
spinrite can recover some drive failures if its just corruption and not hardware failure.
whether you need it is a personal call

 

[DasFox]

Originally posted by: 0roo0roo
some a+ is bullsh*t.
google the google harddrive failure study.
doing stuff like spinrite is a waste of time, failing drives a luck of the draw.
spinrite can recover some drive failures if its just corruption and not hardware failure.
whether you need it is a personal call

Sorry I forgot to mention, the reason I was looking at SpinRite, wasn't for recovery purposes, but to do the job of marking bad sectors that the ECC in drives failed to do was all, hopefully helping to improve things if this helps anything at all...

THANKS

 

[0roo0roo]

well perhaps if you are doing something mission critical you'd go to all that trouble. i mean you could run memtest weekly on the off chance your ram goes bad as well

the better solution is backup and raid.

 

[DasFox]

Ok, let me say it this way since I've had some more time to think.

If ECC on the drive fails to do it's job then I would of thought this isn't good for whatever reasons your searching for...

For me it's about making sure bad sectors just get marked that the ECC failed to do ensuring everything works like it does so you do't run into problems, like data getting stored on one of these sectors by accident and then loosing it, so by using SpinRite and it marks them bad, it's not used and data gets stored in another sector...

The way this is coming across to me from Mike Meyers is that a drive can have bad sectors and still work perfectly well, because these are normal imperfections that can pop up from time to time, nothing to do with a hard drive dying...

 

[0roo0roo]

its fine if you have the time or inclination.
its a bit like checking your tire pressure daily.

 

[Mide]

I run a chkdsk every month or so. If you think something is fishy with your HDD, run a chkdsk and then run the utility software from the manufacturer...that usually will accurately tell you if your HDD is going to eat it or not.

 

[Nothinman]

I don't run any utilities unless there's an obvious need.

Actually thanks for the reminder, I need to turn off the auto fsck on my filesystem here cause ext2/ext3 still defaults to a fsck after so many days/mounts without a fsck "just in case" which I find annoying. Looking at the filesystem the defaults seem to be 6 months or 29 mounts.

 

[DasFox]

SpinRite is listed as a preventive maintenance tool also, and that is all I was looking out of it...

 

[ChAoTiCpInOy]

Does SpinRite not really do anything to prevent hard drives from failing?