Disk Check freezing - What to do?

Anaxim · 19 Jun 2011

My computer rebooted while I slept, so I went and checked the Windows Logs for my System. Found out it was KERNEL-Power but that appears to have also taken our router and my brother's computer so I can safely assume something went wonky with the power.

However, I did notice a pair of errors, both occurring a little while before the reboot, for bad blocks on my harddisk. Obviously, I decided to do a disk check.

I tried to run the first one on my primary partition, C, and for that had to reboot since it holds Windows. The check ran fine for a few moments, but got stuck on a certain point when processing index (Step 2). Rebooting so it would try again got to the exact same point and was stuck.

Currently running on the other partition of my main harddisk. So far so good, but I'll update if that one gets stuck as well.

My specs:
One month old Windows 7 Home Premium x64
6, according to a lab, working gigabytes of DDR3 RAM in 3 sticks.
An i7 920 with a brand new monster of a fan.

Any ideas what to do about the freezing disk check?

MilesAhead · 19 Jun 2011

While booted to the good partition I'd do a diagnostic on the partition that gets the freeze. Whatever HD it is I'd try to get the diagnostic software from them first. If you can't then use a general one for that disk type.

Trouble with chkdsk is once the dirty bit for the partition is set, if you can't get chkdsk to complete, then it's really difficult to clear the bit. If it won't clear from the "good" partition try a bootable CD with disk diagnostic software on it.

Anaxim · 19 Jun 2011

I can boot from another HD, since the other partition isn't a bootable one. Would that work?

MilesAhead · 19 Jun 2011

If you can get it to chkdsk complete it should clear the dirty bit. I'm not a disk expert. You might want to make sure the chkdsk you use understands the partition you are checking. What I mean is with Vista they made some changes to NTFS partitions so I'd make sure the chkdsk program is at least Vista or later.

In any case it's a good idea to do a disk diagnostic. Not super thorough 20 days running type, but basic quick check. You can waste a lot of time trying to fix a dead disk if you know what I mean. Might as well find out as soon as possible. If the disk diagnostic shows you're getting loads of retries that's an indicator it's time to save what you can get cuz it's on the way out.