Hard Drive Paranoia

Brought my laptop running XP out of hibernation mode today and tried to start Firefox, and got some weird error about it not being able to start due to a missing file.  Tried to start something else and started seeing weirdness in other apps as well and decided to reboot.  Upon reboot, CHKDSK automatically ran and found (and seemingly fixed) a TON of errors.

I went to the Event Viewer (Start->Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Event Viewer) and could only find this error "The system failed to flush data to the transaction log. Corruption may occur." which, after a quick Google check led me to believe it was only related to pulling out my USB drive.

I felt compelled to thoroughly check the drive before I put any more serious work onto this laptop only to risk losing it.

My idea was to copy a lot of data and then run a comparison.  First, I ran JDiskReport.  It's a great tool for identifying what's taking up space on your hard drive.  Using this, I located a local directory taking up about 25G.

I copied this directory to c:\testA

Then, though it might have been overkill, I copied it to c:\testB

Then I used another tool I'm liking: FreeFileSync.  This directory sync tool has a setting allowing you to compare file contents instead of just sizes and timestamps.

It took about an hour, but I compared c:\testA to c:\testB.  FreeFileSync reported no file differences.

Then, just to be safe I compared the original source directory to c:\testA.  Again, FreeFileSync reported no file differences.

Since I had done a lot of writing and reading of the hard drive I checked the Event Viewer again and found nothing scary.

From a command prompt (Start->Run->CMD[Enter]), I ran chkdsk c: .  It did do a few more fixes but it also gave me a message to the effect of "This does not indicate disk corruption".  Still, I was a little concerned, so

I ran chkdsk /f c: .  The /F switch tells CHKDSK to fix errors on the disk if found.  It can't run while I'm in Windows so it asks if I want to schedule it for the next boot and I answer Y.  Then I reboot.

It ran successfully, but just to be extra safe I ran chkdsk /r c: .  The /R switch tells CHKDSK to scan the entire disk for bad sectors.  Again, it can't run while I'm in Windows so it asks if I want to schedule it for the next boot and I answer Y.  Then I reboot.

It took a long time to run (maybe a couple hours), but it ran successfully.

Checked the Event Viewer again and this time I am seeing a couple entries from yesterday in the System category which seem to indicate a problem occurred:

Warning: "An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk0\D during a paging operation."

Error: "A parity error was detected on \Device\Ide\iaStor0."

Still nothing from today, though.  Guess I will keep an eye on it.