chkdsk takes forever...

[cbs604]

...well, 20 minutes at least.

It's a P166 with 96M ram and oodles of defragged diskspace.

If chkdsk runs after an abnormal shutdown (which happens frequently) chkdsk runs to about 15% fairly quickly then takes about 20 minutes to complete.

Is this normal? (it's not my machne, btw), and if not, what to look for?



Cheers,
Brodie

 

[mattjurado]

How old is the drive? You are on a very old and slow system. If it used to take seconds, and all of a sudden this started, I'd backup your data, you may experience a hard drive failure soon. If its always been slow, and you're just experiencing it more often because of improper shutdowns, you can edit the msdos.sys file to avoid it running after every shutdown. First, remove the read-only and hidden attributes for the file c:\msdos.sys. Then edit it, and edit the line

autoscan=1

to

autoscan=0

If its not there at all, add autoscan=0 at the end of the file.

Matt J.

 

[cbs604]

Thanks, Matt,

Actually the harddrive is the youngest part the system, about 18 months as I recall. It's a Seagate 13Gb. As I said, it isn't mine, so checked with the owner who confirmed that this behaviour is "normal".

Good idea - I will modify the msdos.sys file.


Cheers,
Brodie

 

[compuveg]

Personally I would leave the autoscan option at '1'. When files get closed improperly it can cause lots of problems, or they wouldn't have scandisk run automatically when the system crashes. Go get a cup of coffee or something and let scandisk run.

If the system's crashing a lot, look elsewhere for a fix. Skipping the scandisk can only lead to more problems. If you're really in a rush you can manually cancel the scandisk without a problem.

 

[Jontmke]

How much of that 13GB is used? Getting a P166 to scan over 10GB will take a long time.
Also, when in Windows go the advanced properties of scandisk and uncheck the setting for checking the date stamp. This can add to the time and can actually give you problems. I am pretty sure the dos version uses the same paramters. Example: My bios hiccuped once and the date got changed back to 1980. Scandisk then ran and thought the file stamps HAD to be wrong, because they had a future date. So scandisk changed all the file stamps to 1980!!!

Jon

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge. (Bertrand Russell)

 

[cbs604]

There is less than 3 Gb of the 13 being used.

The other thing I forgot to mention was the MB doesn't support the 13Gb disk and it has to use Ontrack to recognise its full size. I know chkdsk runs before Windows starts, but could this be the cause of some severe performance problems? For example, to open Control Panel it takes a full 30 seconds.

Cheers,
Brodie

 

[ski]

I would just press the X key to bypass the disk scan during a restart, and run Scandisk after Windows loads.

If ScanDisk takes a long time, then do a Ctrl-Alt-Del on the Desktop, and shut down all programs except Explorer and Systray prior to running ScanDisk.