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How long to let Check Disk (chkdsk) hang before maunually rebooting

N

nwrigley

Senior member
My friends computer gave an unable to write to disk error while Steam was updating a game (not sure exactly what the error was). She said she had also had issues with the computer hanging lately. She lives on a different coast now, so I can't help her hands on, but I walked her through scheduling a chkdsk task, figuring that would be a good place to start. That was Saturday night and it's been stuck at 22% since (over 24 hours now).

I've heard of chkdsk taking over 24 hours before, but what is the practical limit on how long chkdsk could take to complete? The consensus is that you should never do a hard restart to interrupt chkdsk. Will chkdsk always complete and the boot if given enough time? The machine had no problems booting before. Hard disk activity light is still flashing.
 
It shouldn't take that long!

Ask her to put her ear next to the computer and see if you can hear a repetitive click-click-click sound and the the HD led flash is in sync with the click.
 
Never more than an hour, especially if the bar doesn't even move 1%. Any longer than that, its a clear indication that the HDD may have bad sectors. Have her check with CrystalDiskInfo and find if it shows any bad sector warning. Usually a simple Caution message would be shown if there are errors. If there are errors, you could choose to replace it or do a full format(quick format won't be sufficient for bad sectors).
 
I've had two systems do this or similar hangs at various operations.

It was a bad sata cable on both.
 
dma0991 said:
Never more than an hour, especially if the bar doesn't even move 1%. Any longer than that, its a clear indication that the HDD may have bad sectors. Have her check with CrystalDiskInfo and find if it shows any bad sector warning. Usually a simple Caution message would be shown if there are errors. If there are errors, you could choose to replace it or do a full format(quick format won't be sufficient for bad sectors).
Click to expand...

Where would CrystalDiskInfo report a bad sector warning? I haven't used it before.
 
I had her unplug and reseat the cables, but she doesn't have a spare SATA cable to swap in. CrystalDiskInfo gives a caution for Health Status and warns about the Current Pending Sector Count, which is at 186.
 
You have to make her do a full format. While reformatting the OS, you could delete the partition and recreate it using full format. As I said earlier, quick format would not be enough to hide/fix the bad sectors. Doing a full format will take awhile but writes on bad sectors will become less frequent or eliminated altogether as the HDD now recognizes the location of the bad sector.

Bad sectors becomes a real problem when you have small portions of a file written to it and becomes unreadable. If the file is an integral component of the OS itself, it hangs indefinitely as it tries to read.
 
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