Alternatives to chkdsk?

[Soichiro]

Hi everyone, I've been experience issues lately and as such have been trying to run chkdsk to see if any of the problems are being caused by my hard drives. However, since I have very large hard drives, the built-in chkdsk utility, when I run it with "Check for bad sectors" enabled, decides that it's totally acceptable to use 6.5 GB of RAM and bring my computer to a complete standstill.

As such, I was wondering if anyone knew of any (preferably freeware) alternatives to the built-in chkdsk utility.

 

[redduc900]

Run the chkdsk /r command from the Recovery Console command prompt.

 

[c627627]

Is this an external hard drive and is your operating system Windows 7?

 

[Soichiro]

Is this an external hard drive and is your operating system Windows 7?

Yes. Does Windows 7 have some weird interaction with external hard drives that causes it to use a ton of memory?

 

[c627627]

Absolutely it does.

I've tested this to be a Windows 7 bug that has not been fixed to this day. If you had a dual boot, you could reboot into Windows XP and scan that external drive without any memory problems under Windows XP.


I've been meaning to test Windows 8 to see if it has been resolved there. If you ever install Windows 8, would you post back here in your thread just to say if the problem is still there in Windows 8?

 

[Soichiro]

I don't have plans to install Windows 8 any time soon, but if I do, I will test it and let you know. Thanks.

 

[idkfa]

Is the external affected, too? If not unplug for as long as you need to fix the other drives. You could give testdisk a shot, it's very versatile and should have a chkdsk feature.
If everything fails, you might have to your PC run over night when you don't need it.

 

[c627627]

His external drive is the topic.

He cannot check it for errors under Windows 7 because of the memory leak bug that affects external drives only. Windows 7 bug does not affect internal drives, only external drives. Your overnight suggestion might be worth a try, it shouldn't completely freeze the system, only render it unusable while it runs overnight.


EDIT: Windows 8 fixed this problem which was still present in Windows 7 as of 2014.