chkdsk & SpinRite

I'm studying for my A+ and I have Mike Meyers book, and in it he mentions for maintenance to use chkdsk once a week.

Personally I've never used chkdsk unless I felt there was a reason valid enough to use it, but of course drives can die out of the blue...

Also he mentions the ECC in drives not always working and marking back sectors and using SpinRite as another tool that should be used to help identify any problems here that the hard drive fails to see, and mark the sectors that the drives ECC fails to do...

What are some thought here on using chkdsk on a regular basis for maintenance?

Also I'm wondering if Mike is mentioning SpinRite, then should all us geeks and techs have this in our supply of tools to use, no geek should be without it?

THANKS

 

I like spinrite. Helped me determine faulty drives when aruging for an RMA many times. You should also check out MHDD, although it is free it is perhaps a little more complex to use. But it does some neat stuff.

Sul.

 

Hello DasFox,

CHKDSK & Spinrite are great additions to the old toolbox. I don't use Spinrite that often, but its there if i need it, to recover from some impending disaster.

I use CHKDSK /r from windows disc at its 'repair' console.

Take Care
Rico

 

I also like Spinrite but it can be very drive intensive. I run it on all my drives once every 6 months as preventative maintenance.

I run chkdsk once a month on all drives or as needed.

 

I forgot to mention, the reason I was looking at SpinRite, wasn't for recovery purposes, but to do the job of marking bad sectors that the ECC in drives failed to do was all, hopefully helping to improve things if this helps anything at all...

Also If ECC on the drive fails to do it's job then I would of thought this isn't good for whatever reasons your searching for...

For me it's about making sure bad sectors just get marked that the ECC failed to do ensuring everything works like it does so you do't run into problems, like data getting stored on one of these sectors by accident and then loosing it, so by using SpinRite and it marks them bad, it's not used and data gets stored in another sector...

The way this is coming across to me from Mike Meyers is that a drive can have bad sectors and still work perfectly well, because these are normal imperfections that can pop up from time to time, nothing to do with a hard drive dying...

 

Spinrite can be a good RECOVERY tool, but it can in no way repair a drive, yes it can retest sectors mark as good/bad as appropiate- but it wont prevent your drive doing the incorrect action again.

eg if you have bad ECC causing sectors not to be marked as bad, Spinrite wont stop it happening again and you could loose data.

It will not repair anything, it wont fix your drive potentially writting data to a bad sectors (and if your drive is regularly gaining bad sectors thats another issue).

All your doing is cleaning up the symptoms, your not treating the cause, your not preventing the problem reoccuring.

 

So SpinRite should just be used as a recovery tool then? The way Mike Meyers was making it sound like in the A+ book, that it's a good tool to use for prevenative maintenance when the hard drive is not doing its job of ECC properly...