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Scandisk not really important in XP/2k?

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s[H]sIkuA

Member
Joined
Nov 9, 2002
i dont really see scandisk in action whenever i dont restart my comp properly ...

I also cant run scandisk without restart first ...

I thought scandisk is an important tool in windows os

can anyone explain? :p
 
That's because XP/2k use the NTFS file system (well, not always, but by default they do) This filesystem is much more forgiving towards hard resets.

I had one of those "deathstar" hd's and whilst it was in the process of going bad, I just had to run a disk check every so often, and it would recover damaged portions of files and mark sectors as bad. I never lost any data whatsoever, but that hd was BAD.
 
If my pc crashes i cant defrag with out running chkdsk/f on the drive i wish to run defrag on.
True it does not auto run but without it defrag programs just sit there.
scandisk/Check-disk will run if the disk can be unmounted. If it cant be unmounted (because of open files etc.) Then there is no point in checking the disk as parts of it cant be checked.
 
so basicly because the file is NTFS compare to FAT32 ?
:)

thanks for the info

any interesting site about this ?
 
"One key advantage of NTFS is that it is a recoverable file system because it keeps track of transactions against the file system. When a CHKDSK is performed on FAT32, the consistency of pointers within the directory, allocation, and file tables is being checked. Under NTFS, a log of transactions against these components is maintained so that CHKDSK need only roll back transactions to the last commit point in order to recover consistency within the file system. Under FAT, if a sector that is the location of one of the file system's special objects fails, then a single sector failure will occur."

NTFS vs Fat32

Basically what this means is...each time you boot up using NTFS...it takes a picture of your file structor... Then uses that picture to load the OS back to the last known good structor when you have a hard reboot...this in turn eliminates scan disk running every time after a hard reboot...
 
Today I,ve recovered a totally dead XP just by running scandisk on the HDD. So I'm not sure it's an unimportant tool :)

glock19owner is right, NTFS errors (even though they're rare) can most probably be recovered by scandisk through transaction rollback. And that's great ;)
 
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