CHKDSK Slows To A Crawl

[Blewyn]

Am running chkdsk on my C: drive (scheduled on boot) and it runs OK at about 3000 sectors per second then slows to a crawl - I left it running for 8 hours and it got to about 50% of the last step (4 of 5) but by that time was slo slow it would have taken hours more to finish.

Any ideas ?

 

[zigzag3143]

Am running chkdsk on my C: drive (scheduled on boot) and it runs OK at about 3000 sectors per second then slows to a crawl - I left it running for 8 hours and it got to about 50% of the last step (4 of 5) but by that time was slo slow it would have taken hours more to finish.

Any ideas ?

How full is the drive? How much free space?

 

[Dwarf]

In addition, how big is the C: partition on your drive?

 

[Blewyn]

The drive is a 464GB actual (ie 500GB)
The windows partition is 414GB, with 139GB free.

 

[Dwarf]

It could be that there are areas on disk that need fixing, and this just takes time, the amount of which being dependant on the number and types of errors that it encounters.

 

[Blewyn]

It has now been running for 3.5 hrs, and has reached stage 3 (verifying security descriptors), and is running at around 20 per second (there are 212736), and has about 90 minutes to go at this rate until it reaches stage 4. Is this normal, or is my HD crapping out ?

If so, is there a quick and easy way for me to clone a new 500GB HD, or will I have to reinstall everything ?

 

[hubris]

Hi.

1. how old is the HD.
2. did you do a disk cleanup first.
3. did you defrag disk 2nd.
4. big disks take time if 1. and 2. have not been done 1st.

 

[Blewyn]

The HD is relatively new - it's a 500GB 2.5in so it can't be more than a year or two from manufacture, right ?

I did not run a cleanup but I did defrag. The defrag program reported 0% fragmentation but I ran it anyway.

Now (7hrs into the chkdsk run) it's at 15% of task 4, doing around 10 sectors per second, but every now and again it stops completely for minutes at a time. At this speed it needs another 5 hours to complete stage 4....

 

[Dwarf]

Let it finish. If you keep interrupting it, it has to start from the beginning again and it can end up taking longer than it would do had you allowed to finish in the first place.. Only when it has completed running will the flag be cleared that tells the system to run it upon boot.

 

[Blewyn]

Now it has completely stopped for about 20mins.....

 

[Dwarf]

Don't worry, just give it time. In fact, just to make you feel slightly better, the commercial program Spinrite which does a similar type of job (although it operates at a more fundamental level than ChkDsk), has been known to take several weeeks to complete its scanning in some cases.

 

[Blewyn]

What if I take the drive out, put it in an enclosure and connect it to my desktop, then Chkdsk it from there ? Will it work better ?