Fix Your Own PC

There's a couple of ways to check if the HDD (hard drive) is going bad. This is totally non-destructive, so don't get anxious. The easiest is to go to My Computer and right-click on the desired drive you need to check, say the C: drive. On the menu that appears, go down to Properties and click. You'll see an option under the Tools tab for Error Checking:

Just hit the Check Now... button and you'll have a couple of options. Run it as is with default settings or check the options boxes.

Checking the options boxes (see right) will give you the most complete disk check, but you will be prompted to reboot and the disk check (actually chkdsk) will run when you reboot and before the computer goes into Windows.

When the computer reboots, this will check for and possibly fix any HDD errors. You'll only have a short window (a few seconds) after it's run to see if there are any errors on the HDD. But after Windows reboots, go back to Start, then Run, and type in "eventvwr".

The Event Viewer windows will open and under Application on the left side, a WinLogon (Source) timestamped today (or whenever you do it) will appear on the left pane. That will have the chkdsk results logged there. Note any errors or bad sectors.

The other way to run chkdsk is from a command prompt. Bringing up a command prompt is a handy thing to know anyway. You'll impress your tech. Go to Start, then Run, type in "cmd" (no parenthesis):

Hit the OK button and you'll have a command prompt. Type in chkdsk /r c: and you'll be prompted run chkdsk next time the computer reboots. Just type y and chkdsk will run when you reboot.

This will check for and possibly fix any HDD errors. You'll only have a short window (a few seconds) after it's run to see if there are any errors on the HDD. But after Windows reboots, go back to Start, then Run, and type in "eventvwr".

Last updated 5/4/08

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